Creating the Wave

Jan 31, 2009 15:47

Thank goodness that week's over.

I'm co-delivering a course for primary school teaching assistants at the moment. Its at almost the exact opposite end of the age scale to my normal work, but its great fun. Having been on a few training courses myself to get up to speed, there are some wonderfully creative people out there who are trying to make this age group see how much fun science can be.

In order to make our course fun, we've been coming up with all sorts of games. One uses dice to create "designer babies" (a term which usually makes my blood boil, but its very appropriate here). Because these games are to be used with littlies, we need big dice. As a gamer, I am as susceptible to the lure of dice as many others of my kind. We've ordered some (blind) that are supposed to bounce, but I won't know how good they are until Monday.

So we've been out today looking for big dice; soft, wooden, foam, big enough for little hands. On the internet, not such a problem, but you try finding shops that sell so much as normal dice these days. And we have the Metro Centre to go at! I did find quite a large wooden one (about 10cm across), so I've bought that. I also found some balsa wood blocks (about 6cm across), so I've bought one of them and I'm painting it up. I think it would be nice if the children could do that too; not only could they be really creative with the decoration, it'll help them to add up if they stick to the opposite faces adding up to 7 thing.

And that brings me on to creativity: Many of my students won't believe me when I tell them that to be good scientists they need to be creative. Creativity is not the same as artistic ability, something which is often forgotten. And if you're going to link creativity to science and have people believe it, then you need to start young.

dice, science, creativity

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