Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello, good morning.
First thing I feel I ought to do is apologise for my
incredibly boring shoes.
But, I don't know if you can all see this
thing on the table.
I'm quite excited to be here at The Royal Institution.
It's a famous organisation, and so I thought I'd and
relate what I'm talking about to the the Institute.
So I've got something you can all make at home.
What I'm about to show you excited one of my students so
much, he made one for his mum for Valentine's Day.
Are you supposed to make things for your mum for
Valentine's Day?
I don't know, but he did.
Anyway, it's very simple.
You need a battery, some neodymium magnets, which you
can buy off the internet or steal from - borrow from -
school, and some copper wire.
And you twist the copper wire so that a bit of it sits on
top the battery, and the bottom has to be touching the
magnets, and if you get it just right, it will do that.
Yeah, come on.
[APPLAUSE]
Alright, so that will carry on for quite a while.
A student of mine had an idea that you could put a
photograph of your mum and it would spin around.
My kids really like their mums, obviously.
This is a very, very simple electric motor.
It's the kind of thing that you have in your hair dryer or
lawn mower or any other thing that moves due to
electricity, really.
And this phenomenon was discovered right here by
Michael Faraday, who worked at the Institute in the 1800s.
And, it's one of the things he discovered that
transformed the world.
But he also discovered something else that
transformed the world even more, if that makes sense.
And, I've built my own version, because obviously I'm
a sad, lonely man who has nothing better to do than sit
at home building models of things Faraday made.
But this is again some magnets - can you
see that in the back?
There's some neodymium magnets - again you can tell I like
those - and some copper wire again, and there's an LED at
the top - it's a light bulb.
And those things are not connected to each other, so I
don't know if you can see the whole
right through the magnets.
So the wires are connected to the light bulb.
There is no power source.
There's no source of electricity, and yet if I do
that, you can see that the light bulb lights up.
So, obviously, I'm producing electricity, because the LEDs
need electricity to work.
And this is, in fact, how all of the electricity and all of
the power stations in the world is generated.
You get some magnets, and you move them round
next to some wires.
And again it was Michael Faraday who discovered this
phenomenon.
And this has changed the world.
And it relates to what you guys are talking about,
because once we learned how to make electricity like this, we
built giant versions of this, which we drive by burning
fossil fuels to make steam.
So it's a fantastic invention, it transformed our world.
It gave us easily accessible and available electricity.
But, at the same time, it's probably what led to some of
the issues we've got today.
Now I haven't got lots of facts and figures for you,
you'll be glad to know.
There's my Twitter handle for anyone who wants to follow me.
I'm not actually sure it's appropriate for students to
follow me, so don't follow me.
What I'm going to talk about today is, should science in
schools be compulsory?
Now Faraday, like me, was obviously a geek, loved
science, didn't go to school, taught himself.
So keen to find out about the natural world, that he taught
himself science.
And, all of you guys would have to learn science up to
16, it's compulsory, you didn't have any choice.
And your obviously here because you've got some
interest in science or because your teachers made you, I
don't know.
But, they'll be lots of kids in your school, like lots of
kids that I've encountered, who don't really want to do
science up to 16.
They're not really interested in it, no matter how hard
people like me try to get them interested, they're not.
So is it fair that we force them to study science up to
the age of 16?
That's something I'd like you to think about.
And if you conclude that, yes, we should make all students
study science, then I'd like you to think
about some other things.
For example, what should we teach in school science?
Now, I guess what I'm trying to get at is what's the point
of learning science?
For some of you, and far too often, I think it is presented
as you have to do it because the government says so, and
you can get some pieces of paper, which than let you do A
levels, which get you more pieces of paper so you can go
to university.
And, I don't know, maybe that's a good reason for doing
science at school.
One of the things that the current government and
previous governments have been thinking about is the point of
science education.
And some people argue that the point of science education is
to create future scientists.
So, you know, England can have people doing
science in the future.
Now, I've just read a book called Geek Nation, and that's
about India.
And there's lots of Indians doing science.
So, I don't know if we even need British people doing
science, because the Indians are doing it pretty well and
the Chinese.
So, should science education be about creating future
scientists?
Is that what science education is about?
There is another way of looking at it.
Perhaps, science education should be about educating all
citizens, so that they can take part in the democracy
that we live in.
We live in a very science driven society, and we need
people to be sufficiently well informed, so that they can
make decisions that involve science.
So maybe we should educate people at school using the
idea of science for scientists, rather than
science for future scientists.
However, there's another way of looking at it which a
friend of mine, Alice Bell, she's on Twitter as well, if
everyone's doing this Tweeting thing.
She says that we should all do the same thing at school, that
we should all get to play with science stuff - learn about
science - and it becomes a shared cultural experience.
So that when we all grow up, we can all chat about science.
I personally think that's an interesting way
of looking at things.
But, the government, in I believe around 2006, that they
did come up with this idea of splitting science, so that you
can have science for future scientists
and science for citizens.
And I don't know about your schools, but I know that there
are GCSE courses that take students down either route,
and those are already available.
Now, you've learned lots of facts at school like Ohm's
Law, or Hooke's Law, or osmosis and stuff.
And obviously there's an awful lot of stuff - facts - in
science that you could learn at school.
And the question is, which of those facts should you learn?
Again that's something I want you to think about.
What is important?
What facts of science should you learn?
So, for example, should we concentrate on the big ideas
like evolution, or should we look at modern science and
things that are more relevant?
I'm always hearing people saying you should make science
more relevant at school.
You can probably tell from the way I said that I don't
necessarily agree with that.
But, there might be a strong argument for it.
You might think, you know, I don't really need to learn
about electric motors.
Maybe we should be learning a bit more about global warming,
although I think they do global
warming in Latin nowadays.
So, I'm not sure we need anymore of it.
I didn't say that, that probably upsets you.
Or perhaps, perhaps we should forget the facts, and look at,
instead, the history and the philosophy of science.
Again, this was a change to the curriculum that was
brought in around 2006, where people thought, hold on, maybe
we don't need to just teach them facts.
We need to teach them something
called, how science works.
OK?
And I can hear muttering in the audience, so you've
clearly come across the idea.
And you might want to think about whether we
keep that or we don't.
It's up to you.
Finally, you've all probably done practical work at school,
I don't know.
Probably Hooke's Law, have you all done Hooke's Law?
What's the point Hooke's Law?
You get some springs, you hang some weights off of it.
And it's probably incredibly boring, right?
And, Hooke already did it, right?
So, you didn't really find out anything new, and the school
has to spend loads of money buying springs every year
because I know you mess them up, right, and the weights and
the things.
Because I know you borrow equipment occasionally.
Practical work in schools is really expensive, OK?
And here's something some of you won't know, and some of
the adults might not know.
Research, science people have gone and looked at whether
students learn anything from practical work, or not.
And the results are inconclusive.
There's some evidence that suggests that practical work
might largely be a waste of time.
Would you include practical work in your ideal science
curriculum, or should we scrap it altogether?
Now, the other guys had lots of fantasy graphs and things,
and I think I've run out of stuff to talk about.
Look at that.
Sounds like a sound bite, you want sound bites, don't you?
These are real issues, right?
The Tory government is going to develop a new national
curriculum.
And the people who have to make decisions about what's
going to be on that curriculum are going to be thinking about
these very issues.
And I don't know what answers they're going to come up with,
but I'm looking forward to seeing what
you make of it all.
I'm done, I've probably finished a bit early.
So, thank you.