• Question: how can teachers at my school make science less boring as a subject?

    Asked by sophieo to Barbara, Matt, Ravinder, Sophie, Tristan on 11 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Barbara Shih

      Barbara Shih answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      I’m afraid I don’t know really know what would make students interested in science classes – maybe you can give me/your teacher some ideas?

      My biology teacher in high school once made DNA cocktail in class with strawberry and vodka, which was pretty awesome fun (but I’m not sure how old you are). I personally feel like science at school would be more interesting if students can learn about science from current events. For example, the science sections on BBC news, or learn about the science behind what they do in crime drama, or even compare the diets of different types of sports players to learn about nutrition. These examples are biology-based since I’m a biologist; I’m sure there will be similar things when it comes to physics/engineering (maybe learn about bridges and planes), chemistry (maybe finding a new year firework display and disucss what’s the chemcials that gives the specific colours). Then again, unfortunately I’m not a teacher and have no idea what you need to learn about at school.

      I feel science at school was a little misleading. All the boring memorisation of new words was never my cup of tea, and the occassional cool experiments aren’t really what science is about either (I think it should be about defining a problem, and addressing it by searching for possible explainations on the internet and coming up with ideas to test them).

    • Photo: Sophie Robinson

      Sophie Robinson answered on 12 Mar 2015:

      Science can be made fun by doing fun experiments and explaining things in a way you can relate to. Sometimes it’s not always possible to do fun experiments though and you have to learn the theory behind them.

      It’s probably best for us to ask you what you think would make science lessons less boring?

    • Photo: Matthew Moore

      Matthew Moore answered on 12 Mar 2015:

      I found most of science boring myself in school. There are a lot of facts to learn but you should always ask yourself ‘how do they know this?’ ‘how did they find this out’ some of the most complex concepts in science were actually discovered by the simplest experiments!

      Science doesn’t actually aim to prove things but disprove them (falsification). Think about things that are accepted in science and challenge them, go through the proccess yourself, imagine what would disprove them!

      That’s where science gets really interesting: the process of finding answers for yourself! Ultimately biology, chemistry and physics lie on a continuum of description and experiment and analysis –read around the topic imagine how chemistry impacts on biology and how biology impacts on physics and you’ll likely just want to learn as much as possible!

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