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Title: Issues/Education/Literacy - NYTimes.com - When Backyards Were Laboratories Scientific literacy begins at home. [Requires free NYTimes.com registration to view.] (May 19, 2002)

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When Backyards Were Laboratories

May 19, 2002

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When Backyards Were Laboratories

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

CONOMICS may be the dismal science, but these days the news about chemistry, physics and biology is fairly dismal as well. At the end of April, the National Science Foundation released its biannual report on the state of science and to no one's surprise, public understanding and attitudes have been found wanting. A bare majority of Americans, for instance, know that it takes the Earth a year to orbit the Sun, according to a survey conducted for the report. More than half think that the dinosaurs and the earliest humans coexisted, and that lasers work with sound waves. Scientific illiteracy in the United States is not a new problem, of course, and the foundation's analysis contained the usual hand-wringing about the state of science education, particularly in secondary schools. But perhaps the problem goes beyond the classroom, to what happens when school is out. For many children, particularly boys, free play used to mean fiddling around with a chemistry set in the basement or lighting things on fire in the backyard. These days, with parents' penchant for overscheduling their children, there is less time for such youthful experimentation. This is not all bad � no doubt fewer children are getting hurt. But backyard tinkering used to lead, if not to a scientific career, at least to continued informal pursuit of science as an adult hobby. If that is not so much the case anymore � if yesterday's youthful tinkerers no longer grind their own telescope mirrors, build radios or order weather balloons by mail from Edmund Scientific � something important may have been lost. "Parents tell me their kids don't do much of it, mainly because they make sure their kids' days are fully scheduled from breakfast to lights-out," said Homer Hickam, whose best-selling memoir, "Rocket Boys" (Delacorte, 1998), recounted his youthful adventures exploring rocketry in a West Virginia coal town in the Sputnik era. "It's a shame," he said via e-mail. "I had a lot of time on my hands when I was growing up and learned to fill that time with imaginative pursuits." Youthful tinkering can often lead to a career in science or engineering. Mr. Hickam, for example, was a NASA engineer before turning to writing. And the founders of Apple Computer, Stephen Wozniak and Steven P. Jobs, famously pieced together their first computers on a wooden workbench in a California garage. "In the old days, we got good engineers because people got to focus on it early," said William Gurstelle, an engineer in Minneapolis. Many of those engineers, he said, came from rural areas, where as they grew up they faced a choice. "There was nothing to do in those towns except drink and tinker," Mr. Gurstelle said. "You either went one direction or the other." Alarmed about the lack of tinkering, Mr. Gurstelle wrote a book, "Backyard Ballistics" (Chicago Review Press, 2001), that features simple and safe pyrotechnic experiments for older children, including potato cannons and tennis-ball mortars. But the problems he had getting it published, he said, illustrate another reason that tinkering is in decline. MR. GURSTELLE said he left some of the riskier projects out of the manuscript (including a simulated grain elevator explosion) and included a long section about safety, but the book was still rejected by many publishers who were scared about the potential for lawsuits. But the potential for lawsuits may not be the only reason for the decline in tinkering. For one thing, there's stiff competition from television, video games, computers and other distractions. For another, science hobbies aren't so simple anymore. "The things that people could work on right now have gotten really complicated," Mr. Gurstelle said. People are considered adept, for example, if they can swap out a computer hard drive. Almost no one can get inside a drive and repair it. People who as teenagers three or four decades ago could tune their own cars with little more than a timing gun would need thousands of dollars of equipment, and a course of study at a trade school, to do so today. But a little complexity is not necessarily so bad, said Shawn Carlson, director of the Society for Amateur Scientists and the last writer of the Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American (the column was canceled several years ago). Sure, Mr. Carlson said, Heathkit build-it-yourself radios are no longer available, but these days, for not very much money, a hobbyist can buy an exceptional radio that will allow a level of involvement and discovery that wouldn't have been possible before. Very few people grind telescope mirrors anymore, but for someone with an interest in astronomy there are good, relatively inexpensive telescopes that make it easy to explore the heavens. "Do you lose something by not making your own telescope?" Mr. Carlson said. "Of course you do. But at the same time, a lot of people can get involved who couldn't have before." MR. CARLSON thinks there are still plenty of opportunities for people, young or old, to be involved in science, although admittedly they may be more formal than before. There are birding programs, museums that organize dinosaur digs, model rocketry clubs and robotics clubs, to name just a few. (Clubs for building fighting robots have become especially popular, and even Mr. Gurstelle acknowledges that they are a "tinkerer's delight.") The important thing, Mr. Carlson said, "is to try to identify those people who have an aptitude and an interest in science and give them all the help they need to take it as far as they can." Mr. Hickam said that in his travels, he occasionally attends local science fairs and sees first-hand those children who have a passion for science. "Some don't care how anything works as long as it does," he said. "But others, mostly the minority, have a natural curiosity about things and will eventually, no matter how structured their life, haul out a screwdriver and have at it."

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