It’s no longer enough to teach kindergarteners to read – these days, the push is on to squeeze nantotech lessons in between Barney and Teletubbies and keep it up until high school graduation. In a very interesting essay, Rutgers professor Dr. Stephen Danforth talks about his efforts to bring nanotechnology into K-12 classrooms, and to make nanotechnology an integral part of future science and engineering curricula in schools. His thoughts are seconded by Mike Roco of the National Science Foundation. These are the kinds of programs that will make nanotech visionaries like 23-year-old Josh Wolfe commonplace instead of exceptional.
3 thoughts on “Teaching Little Lessons About Nanotech To Kindergarteners”
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I don’t think this is appropriate for school hours. Special interest education hurts our school system because it takes time away from reading, writing, and mathematics. The base subjects teach children how to think and needs to be done as well as possible as early as possible. You give them knowledge about nanotech and a thousand miscellaneous subjects AFTER they learn general purpose skills.
Our educational system already emphasizes core subjects too little, and now even that is being pared down for these pet projects.
…I agree it WOULD be nice to be able to read before learning about electron beam lithography, and jokes aside, I agree solid reading skills are a real problem in schools today. I think the real key is to go ahead and provide enrichment like this to the gifted students who are SO BORED waiting on their classmates to master the obvious…
Another option is to give students teasers of what is to come in the different fields that they may choose to pursue. High school physics can be pretty dry, but take just a few weeks or a month to touch on the overall concepts of some of the cutting-edge research and applications, without having to actually do the math, and you’ll get students excited about the field. You’ll also help them to decide on which field to pursue.