A science lesson for kids

Do you remember what they taught you in science classes..back in your primary school?
For me, I vaguely recall something about nutrition...about cold blood/warm blood animals...positive and negative charge.... something about stars and planets...
These are all interesting stuffs...interesting products of scientific discoveries. Yet, I barely remember being taught about the most powerful (and probably the most useful) things in science: the methodology for testing hypothesis. Well, to be fair, we did study "scientific method" in school..but in a very narrow sense. We did learn that the process start with making observation, creating hypothesis, designing experiment..(with all those control and free variable things to think about)..running experiment..and concluding the finding. Nonetheless, it has never been emphasized enough that such methods could be ..and should be applied to nearly every hypothesis one wanna test in life. Let's say I want to know whether selling strawberry cupcakes or chocolate cupcakes will make more profit..or whether playing soccer with barefoot would score more than with shoes. Also, I think we should teach more statistics and probability..not just how to calculate mean and variance...but also give enough real life examples of pitfall resulted from misunderstanding statistics. Let me give you one classic example.. say. I have thirty students in my class room. I ask all of them to stand up and toss a coin. Those who get a tail have to sit down while those who get a head can toss one more time. About half of the class probably sit down after the first round..then another half of that..and another half of that. Here comes an interesting part when we have a very last student who got  like 4-5 heads in a row. It's very tempting to think that there is something very magical about this student. Wow! how can one get like 5 heads in a row, right? ..but if you think carefully ..oh of course..there are so many students in the class so the probability the one will get 5 head is not so low. If you put this example in a larger context..it's actually pretty similar to many other "magic" we have seen out there..many of these superstitious believes. .follows pretty much the same logic here...There are many people out there try to claim that they have magic...they can do something that has very low probability of success..yet..given how many people try this..the chance that once person will get it working..by pure chance is not so low.
 The most valuable thing kids should learn about science is such methods that allow us to create new body of knowledge about whatever they are interested in doing in the future.

1.50 am. 28 October 2012, Palo Alto CA USA