3d ago

Teaching the scientific method

104 comments

The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.
-- Adam Savage
- Mythbusters embodied the scientific method, but I do wish they'd stopped to actually properly explain it at some point. "Writing it down" is definitely part of the process, but it's not the whole process. The whole process is what they actually did in most of their episodes:
  Make a prediction
  Design an experiment to test that prediction
  Run the experiment and observe the results
  Come up with a conclusion
  Sometimes they played fast and loose with some of these steps to make entertaining TV. But, fundamentally, they were doing science.
  
  Screwing around still covers parts 1-3 though. You say something stupid (hypothesis), your friend dares you to do it (experimentation planning), and you do it (experiment).
  
  I mean presumably they wrote it down when they wrote the script
- Anything can be observable, but "iterative processes" makes it sound fancy
- [Stares shamefully at sparsely populated Obsidian vault, thinking about all bullshit I tinker with just long enough to set it up and forget how the next time I go back to it]

Next try driving over a banana peel. I have some theories about what would happen.
Mamma mia
- Woah. You've also read that Mamma Mia fanfic with the banana train?

Wait, so a “stick” of butter is just a regular shaped block of butter?
- Yes, do y'all not call it that?
  
  German here. We call it a Stück. Could there be some etymological connection?
  
  I don't think we call it anything. It's just butter.

This is exactly the kind of shit you should do with your kids. It teaches them it is not only good to be curious about things but also how to then go seek an understanding to those curiosities. That and its just fun as hell to do silly, goofy experiments.
When adults run into 'dumb' questions like this, we tend to dismiss them and move on, forgetting that there is always an opportunity to learn or to teach. All this really does is stall curiosity and leave the world with a little less knowledge.
- Exactly.
  The flipside, however, is that it validates them asking even more questions, which is good for their development but incredibly annoying for the parent. That said, I could name a bunch of useless facts now because I've looked up way more than I should have. Dinner time is frequently like this (I have three kids, will just give them numbers):
  Kid 1 - How far away is Paris?
  Me - About...
  Kid 2 - What happens if you microwave a fork?
  Me - Hold on, let me...
  Kid 3 - How do you say "ounce" in Spanish?
  Me: Why would you even...
  Kid 2 - I'll go try
  Me - No!! That could destroy the microwave! Sit down, let me answer Kid 1 first. About 5000 miles (made up number, but surprisingly close)
  Kid 1 - How much is that in inches?
  Me - Hold on, it's Kid 2s turn. If you microwave a fork, you'll get sparks and maybe break the microwave. We're not going to try it, but maybe I can find a video for you.
  Kid 3 - You didn't answer my question!
  Me - Sorry, I don't know since I don't speak Spanish, but I'll look it up for you. (10 seconds later) Apparently "la onza," though I don't think anyone that speaks Spanish uses ounces.
  Kid 2 - What if I microwave my dolly?
  Kid 3 - Why?
  Me - <to Kid 3> They usually use metric, so either grams (gramo) or milliliters (mililitro). <to Kid 2> I don't know, but it might ruin your dolly.
  And so on. I have to juggle three conversations at the same time, and sometime a fourth if my SO wants to discuss something. It's absolute madness, but I do what I can to encourage curiousity, but I don't fault anyone for giving lame answers.
  
  Awesome.
  
  317 million inches to Paris
  
  I don't know if it would work, but what I'd try to do in that situation is to make it clear the kids will get more of your time and attention if they put in more effort themselves.
  Like, the kid asking how far away Paris is: get the kid to come up with an estimate and how he/she'd check that estimate. Once they put in the work like that, you give them more time to get to the answer.
  The kid asking about microwaving a fork, tell them it's a dangerous thing to do, tell them you might be able to find a video showing what happens. But, first, ask them to come up with 5 other things they shouldn't touch in the kitchen without a parent's permission and a reason why and write them down.
  I don't have kids, but my dad did something a bit like that with me, and my uncle did something like that with his kids. It seemed to work. I was too young to really remember exactly how it worked with me, but I do remember happily doing research on things and then getting attention from my dad about what I'd figured out. With my uncle, I got to watch his kids (5-6 years younger than me) and how this sort of thing worked. He'd spend about 5 seconds deflecting them, they'd go off and do some things on their own, and he'd have more time to relax. Sometimes they got bored or distracted and didn't come back. When they did come back, they'd come back with something more than just a random question, and he'd spend time with them about what they'd discovered.
  
  Love your comment! My first is 1½ and my second is hatching this summer.
  
  Kid 1 still out there wondering how many inches away Paris is, lol
  Of course, in the moment, answering an artillery barrage of questions is gonna be overwhelming and challenging. No shame in that, especially if you're wrangling three little minions the whole time. I'm getting more at the general idea of fostering a curious environment where saying, "huh, I don't really know what's gonna happen, but lets find out together . . . " regardless of the question or experiment needed to find out, is the default attitude. Which is something it sounds like you do a great job of, btw, but it's also something that seems to be increasingly absent in this modern world (or maybe I'm just getting old)
  
  Try this. Wife in the microwave, kid 3 goes to study in mexico, kid 1 send him to Paris and to measure it himself , kid 2 can stay
  
  That's good parenting
- I guess it's time to introduce them to a family computer, which, while heavily restricted in what websites are allowed, allows accessing wikipedia?
  Edit: I should clarify I'm not a parent

Must be nice to afford science butter in this economy!
- If it's anything like scientific grade peanut butter then yeah, it's expensive! https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387&cclcl=en_US
  
  I just sent this to my wife and told her I ordered some peanut butter on line.
  
  Thank you for this nugget of info. I will always cherish it.
  
  wtf, what's so special about it?
  
  Product Expiration Date: 31 December 2029
  now I know what I'm stocking my bunker with.
  
  wtf, lol that must be some damn good butta!
- She originally asked about science eggs, but that was a big no.

This reminds me so much of my dad (a house painter) when I was a kid! He was always down to indulge my curiosity by experimenting or building something. It was fun at the time, but I'm now in engineering and I'd say a lot of it is just because my dad thought it would be fun to attach a potato cannon to a go kart.
- I'm sure he's very proud that you became an engineer though!
- Potato canons and go karts were the slightly dangerous things we needed as kids.
  I recently read a book called "The anxious generation" that goes into depth talking about the developmental changes in young people over the last 30 years, and it attribute a lot of it to the douboe-whammy combination of 90s and 2000s helicopter parenting paired with the rise of the smartphone.
  We need to unsupervised, slightly dangerous playtime and mischief to learn how to deal with problems on our own or with peers, and we need human interaction to learn to socialize. Removing both of those leads to an increased number of people unprepared to handle social situations and stress.
  The book definitely had a feeling of bias for argument to match preconceived conclusion that social media is bad, but I think there may have been something to it.

I'm very curious about the alternative hypothesis.
- Butter flattens car.
  
  Is there a third options like scissors which can defeat one of these but not the other?
- Mario Kart banana peel spinout
- The car slips over the butter and in a comical fashion slides down the stairs
- it triggers a collision error and the car gets yoten into space
- The butter shoots forward and violently splatters across the driveway, like the blood of a murder victim in a horror movie where there's a lot of blood when someone gets murdered
- Boom.

I would often turn it around and ask them first, what do you think might happen, and walk them through why they think that. Let them build their own hypothesis to be tested.
- Teaching your children to think for themselves? We’ll have none of that here!
  Good for you. Socratic method.
  
  I think they're both smarter than me because of it. But it was easier to use the built-in curiosity of a kid (the imfamous repeated WHY) to drive them to learn things than to just feed them whatever answer was available, or not at all. That's the worse thing a parent can do is shut down a kid's craving for answers.

If Mom had been home, she'd have told you both to put the butter in a clean plastic bag first, unsealed so it won't pop. That way it could have been salvageable, and your tire wouldn't be greasy.
- I dunno, plastic bags sound like confounding variables. The 4 year old peer reviewers won’t stand for this!
  
  Depends on the goal of the experiment. If the only aim is to determine the sqishability of the butter, then a plastic bag would be acceptable as it would provide no meaningful resistance to the tire. However, if one wishes to determine the precise nature of the butter's squish, then many more experiments need to be made, both to establish a control and to analyze additional squish conditions (butter temperature, wrapper on/ off, use of plastic bag, etc.)

Stick of butter like $12 salted these days
- Where the fuck you getting your butter? I pay like $4 for 4 sticks of Kerrygold.
  
  I get all my butter down at the local sex shop, "Slippery Al's". I slather it on my body when I need to go swimming in the cold Canadian ocean once a week
  
  ...our kerrygold comes in slabs, not sticks...

Now do it with margarine and write a paper on the differences

It's a good habit to question how we know what we know. Kudos to this guy for encouraging his child's curiosity!

Next question. If your tire was bald, would it stick to the ground or the tire?
- Probably still the tire, the material is chosen for grip / stickiness
  
  And bald doesn't mean smooth.
  
  I've been giving this way too much thought 😆
  I think it would come down to if the fold in the wrapper was facing up or down. If the tire had tread, I don't think it would matter, but if the slit were facing down, I think the wax paper would keep it from sticking. Unless the pressure squeezed the butter out, in which case I think you'd end up with most of the button on the tire and the wrapper on the ground.
- Maybe we'll find out next time on "nobody asked" the show on drop out entirely about answering questions that likely have never, and probably should never have been asked.
  Dropout is what college humor is called now that they bought themselves and work for themselves now. A play on them dropping out of college to basically work from home and be their own boss. Sure, it's another streaming subscription, but its like 3 dollars or something, and if you don't want to pay that, they also eventually release almost everything to youtube too.

These are the stupid memories that stick with you when you grow up though.
Nobody remembers all the times their parents just said no and dismissed your curiosity. But we absolutely remember the times where our parents engaged in our curiosity.
Good dad. Good kid. A bit of a waste of butter, but it was worth it for the internet points and bonding between parent and child.
- Agreed! I fully remember the time my dad explained the water cycle to me at like 6 years old cause I asked the question "how do rivers not run out of water?"
- It's always weird trying to put in perspective how valuable the things we waste are. Like to us, butter is a couple dollars, cuz it's never not there, we don't have to think about how much butter there is. There is no other tangible cost than the simple dollar value. So like if you compare it to going to see a movie in the theater, the dollar value kind of makes sense of using this butter for entertainment and teaching. But if butter didn't feel potentially unlimited to us, the cost might then not feel worth it, even if the dollar value didn't change.
  
  Yeah, people will go spend $1500 on holidays, but won't spend $3 on this experiment because "it's a waste of butter".

Reminds me of the time I put a partially filled Gatorade bottle under my parents' Jeep as a kid. I remember trying to run it over with my bike, but would just go right over it. Then I got curious what the Jeep would do and wedged it under the back tire. But we didn't go anywhere till the next day, so I forgot I put it there.
The following day, we're backing out of the garage when there's a sudden loud POP. I quickly turn to look and see Gatorade covering that area of the garage. Scared the hell out of my mom.
Was an informative time for everyone involved.
- Maybe this is a good lesson to do a pre-trip walkaround inspection every morning before commuting to work. Takes less than a minute.