The world changes

An echidna, looking into things.

I am about to pitch my echidna book, which in its latest format is aimed at lay readers, but suitable for ages 11-up. One of the issues that engaged me was the use of technical language.

 As a small boy way back in the 1950s, I read a comic book about Tarzan in some sort of Lost World, where he had to fight off a Tyrannosaurus rex, and I can recall being charmed by the name.

So far as I can recall, nobody taught me to read, but I can recall being examined by a panel of teachers in late 1949 (they asked me who the Prime Minister was, and I got it wrong because Bob Menzies had just got in, and that gives me a date), but they were giving me passages to read.

Anyhow, I was one of those precocious readers, and long strings of text brought me only delight, though my playmates and age-peers complained of "big words", both in what they read, and when I spoke. Their communication was essentially monosyllabic, but I had enough smarts not to mention that monosyllabic and polysyllabic were of equal length. I survived.

Forty years later, working with kids at the Australian Museum, I realised that many six-year-olds were unfazed by Diplodocus, Muttaburrasaurus and Megalosaurus. These girls and boys were barely readers, yet they could handle these long words quite fearlessly, just as I had done.

Another thirty years on, last week, my playmates were far more junior to me, about 1/8th my age. Years 3 and 4 at a local school were in my hands as a Visiting Scientist, and as it happens, they recalled me from Talk Like a Pirate Day, 2019, when I taught them how to catch invertebrates in the waters of Manly Dam.

To explain, I am a volunteer in a CSIRO program, but where most of the volunteers talk about their work, I am a working naturalist, and I get my charges doing hands-on stuff. Because of the date,  I told them first about the ancient urban myth of the Manly Dam crocodile, and then we discussed Peter Pan, before I started  them all going "ARRR" in piratical voices.

Only then did I reveal that I thought the crocodile really was there, and that it was almost certainly the one that chased Captain Hook, and so it might be coming after us, thinking "Yummy! Pirates!", but it would eat me first, so they had to watch and shout a warning...

We then dissected why this was untrue, and they learned to think like scientists. After that, we worked like scientists, with nets, sieves, buckets and traps, but  they all recalled going "ARRR". This time I taught them that scientists don't say "I don't know", they say "more research is needed", and they will remember that as well.

Anyhow, these kids are now sparky 9- and 10-year-old true digital natives who were using clip-on microscopes to examine plant and animal material I had brought in, photographing their finds with iPads, selecting, cropping and captioning their best pics before uploading them to Google classroom, so they could show their parents what they did at school.

They switched effortlessly from one app to another, and that was when the answer to my technical language problem hit me: these kids, even the less bright ones, are very different from my cohort, so if I take my usual approach of explaining carefully, they know how to use the information environment to get any answers they may require. I have left the "big words" in.

I will be back there next month, showing some curious physics and engineering to stage 1 kids. I don't have a full plan as yet, but this milk-bottle turbine, seen here being tested by a granddaughter will be a part of it. I won't be teaching them to go "ARRR", and I have no idea yet what they will recall, three years from now, but getting wet feet will probably be a part of their memories.

The construction details appear above: the string and button give a frictionless swivel, the offset holes (try a 2mm drill) at the bottom deliver torque, and the holes in the lid make the bottle re-fill fast when it is pushed into a bucket of water. They also serve to let air in as the water rushes out. If you need more details, or other ideas like this, see my ebook and book, Playwiths.