Teachers Seek to Spice Up the Sciences

Jugglers and fire eaters hit the stage as teachers from across Europe gathered recently to break science out of the textbook. An Irish band’s concert on instruments made entirely of plumbing material--including pipes of various lengths and a drum--demonstrated the principles of resonance.

Armed with everything from water wheels to laptop computers, physicists hope to reverse declining interest in science among the young--which they fear could increasingly blunt their economic strength.

“In a situation where modern society requires more and more technology, the very opposite is happening in our schools,” said Paddy Healy, a lecturer in acoustics at the Dublin Institute for Technology, whose harp adds a traditional note to the Irish concert.

“If Europe wants to keep its place in the world, it needs scientists,” said European Union research commissioner Philippe Busquin. The “Physics on Stage” exhibition at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics featured 400 physics educators from 22 countries.

The week of idea swapping was backed by the European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory, which likewise have an interest in developing the next generation of scientists.

“In some European countries there has been over the past few years a certain disenchantment for scientific study,” Busquin said. European countries spend 1.8% of their gross domestic product on research, as opposed to 2.7% in the United States and 3.1% in Japan, he added.

The Geneva-based physics lab, known by its French acronym CERN, complains of a “frightening decline of interest” among European children and says university enrollments have been falling off as a result.

Those concerns have parallels in the United States. In September, a commission headed by astronaut and former Sen. John Glenn advocated spending 10 times more to train math and science teachers. But the Europeans want to get children hooked before they have a chance to get disenchanted.

“When girls say ‘bye-bye’ to physics, I understand that very well,” said Geir Arge, a teacher of 16- to 18-year-olds from Norway who offers “soft physics combined with strict logic.”

He argues that dry physics terminology is “insufficient,” and he starts with practical experiments to let pupils experience physical phenomena but give them new names.

Czech university lecturer Jiri Dolejsi, fronting a stand full of inexpensive but effective devices including an hourglass-inspired sand alarm clock and a perpetual-motion experiment, stressed that the way to sell science is “to get some experience and not to stay only with formulae and mathematics.”

“The problem is that not every teacher is so active,” he added.

From Hamburg, Germany, came “cosmic classes for teenagers,” which aim to cut out the math and focus on the big questions of the universe--such as, “What holds our world together?”

Not everyone liked everything they saw.

“Some do very good things and some others are repellent,” said Rudolf Ziegelbecker of the Federal Technical Teaching Institute in Graz, Austria, exhibiting a class-made motor contraption that balances itself on two wheels.

For Europe to entice more of its children into the physics classroom, it may have to overcome an image problem.

“Our generation had positive visions of science,” Busquin said. “It was the beginning of the conquest of space. Nuclear energy was still considered an element for peace.”

But “if you see the big films now . . . science is presented as a rather Faustian mechanism, as Frankenstein.”