I think when a kid walks in their first
thought is holy cow what's this place
all about. If any kid walks in the door
chances are they're gonna see something
and boom you can see the spark in their
eye. Asking questions making observations
are all a higher level of what's natural
for humans to do in the first place. I
like to work of the kids see them be
happy about the things they have created
themselves. As soon as I came in I just
sensed a spirit of creativity and energy
and I'm thinking boom this place is
magical for children
we sometimes think of science as things
that happen in a classroom or in a
laboratory actually science is something
that can be part of an everyday healthy
way of being. For us science is more
about a way to be connected to the world
and there's also this side of it that's
creative if you have an idea this is a
space where you can come and you can
bring your ideas to life. There's Liberty
to be creative to be imaginative to
discover to explore to experiment. When I
first heard about the science workshop
movement I was just amazed that there
could be a space where you could have
you know both tadpoles that you're
looking at under the microscope and
power tools! We try to meet people where
they are and so if you kid doesn't
really want to look at the bearded
dragon they don't have to if they don't
want to build a circuit they don't have
to. And I think that's really important
for kids to feel like it's it's all up
to them. A lot of our stuff isn't what
you typically see in a science
laboratory or a classroom. The difference
with science workshops is that these
materials are just out so they're open
they'll approach this object and they'll
just start asking questions and suddenly
their knowledge is forming and they
understand how their previous
experiences in the world are relevant.
We have a wood shop with a wide range of power tools we have a whole lot of
take apart electronics. We have some turtles we have a bearded dragon we have
two snakes. Kids like animals and they get to help create their environments and
be right in front of the animals and feel
smell and hear them.
We try to provide the supplies and provide the environment
for kids to do whatever they can dream up.
There is a huge disparity still between
the haves and the have-nots what we have
here is a grassroots effort.
We're really trying to remove as many barriers as possible.
Children who may not be academically the
superstars can have such a creative
imagination that in a place like this they can thrive
and that becomes a measure of not so much how smart are you but how are you smart.
We are located in an area that's a lot of low-income housing and we have a lot of people that just walk to the space.
They're gonna see friends they're gonna see people with similar backgrounds
and they're gonna feel like it's a space
where they belong and where they can
develop as a person. So we're called free
science partly because kids are free
to be authors of their own education but
we're also free because we don't charge
admission. Participants can just walk in and
there's no membership fees no entry fee.
Everyone can be a scientist and everyone
should have equal opportunity to access
science.
One of my favorite projects was
working with a group of kids to make a
vending machine the kids had to identify
problems as they came up and come up
with ways to solve them and they pushed
through and they had this moment at the
end when they were showing it off and
they were so proud!
There's a young boy who is building an
exact replica of Paul McCartney's bass
guitar. All these engineering skills are
coming out of this project of his - that
sort of drive is something that you just
want to like capture and keep going.
One of the boys decided that he wanted to
make a boat and we talked about how it's
possible to make a boat out of cardboard
so there's a lot of excitement around
you know whether or not this is gonna
float it was so exciting to put it in
the water and see all that hard work
come together
I can imagine that there are children
who will come in here and discover some
things about themselves and their
interests that literally can be
life-changing in terms of how they think
about themselves as a learner. Not a lot
of places you get to have your child
use a power tool or your
child gets to hold a snake. Doing things
that might look dangerous or might look
messy but that's how kids learn and get
really excited about different things
they might not have known they were
excited about by experiencing it with
all their senses. Opportunities like this
that create those types of experience
for young people are one of your best
investments that we can make because we're really talking about things that can
ultimately be transformative in the life
of a child
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