I love that old cliché that references the “less academic” offerings that many institutions of learning have offered over the years. Although the actual course may never have existed, as an idiom it carries a good amount of meaning for us as a society. The courses to which the term “Underwater Basket Weaving” refers offered some guilty pleasures for many of us in our educational journeys, and sometimes they may have even turned out to be genuine learning experiences. I took a number of painting courses in graduate school, and although they did not fulfill any core requirements, nor get me much closer to the goal of graduation, they did offer a tremendous outlet, and an opportunity to use other portions of my brain (even if for just a few hours a week). But somewhere along the line I also learned how to paint.

Today’s internet is headed in a direction where there are sometimes more “Underwater Basket Weaving” distractions than there is “Core” (read as “Important” or “Valuable”) information. Web 2.0 (or the “Read/Write Web”), with all of its interactive and user-generated content opportunities seems to be taking even further down that path. It’s incredibly easy to find information about, gather instruction on, watch videos pertaining to, and join discussions dissecting just about anything anyone is interested in. Heck, I could learn enough about any hobby of mine to research, write and publish a virtual book in an afternoon (and yes, this is me presenting a pure, unadulterated plug for my April 23rd post).

With all these distractions, your might ask, how can I really learn anything truly important? Well, that actually might be just the point–although formal learning certainly needs to have goals, objectives and even assessments to make sure you everyone’s getting where we’d hoped they would, perhaps the informal learning opportunities that present themselves in life could also be just as real and just as important to us. Perhaps “getting lost” in topic we love on the internet, and drinking in content and sharing thoughtful feedback about that content really . . . is . . . learning. And what if that learning could be done with a subject matter expert as a guide by our side? That should be, I believe, one of the major goals with the next evolution of eLearning. And that’s just the kind of experience I hope my kids get during the course of their education, and if it takes me turning my head to the occasional “Underwater Basket Weaving”-type of experience that I may at some point believe that my children are engaging in, then so be it.

Next month our 2009 Summer Camp program starts. This month, we sent over 1200 pages of curriculum to print. Our ideas from the last twelve months have finally coalesced into lesson plans and experiments. With shiny new curriculum in front of me, it’s always a good time to pause and consider our program goals.  If I were forced to distill our curriculum into just one word, that word would be FUN!

My eighteen years of teaching has taught me that learning can and should be fun! Too often learning can be considered as a chore, like eating green leafy vegetables; it is something you do for the benefits, but not your first choice. Intuitively, we all know that you get better results when learning is made fun. Think about the last time you got swept away in a program on the Discovery Channel or innocently sat down at a computer and Googled a topic, only to look up and discover an hour has flashed by.  You know that when a topic is fun, it drives your interest, and guess what?  It no longer feels like learning.

To make learning fun you need two elements, relevance and play. We are all natural learners. It is after all how we progress from an infant to an adult. It is important to capitalize upon this natural curiosity by making the topic relevant and interesting. For play students should be empowered to be able to direct their own learning through games, creativity, or experiments. Students will not readily learn about electricity just because it will be on a test. They can, however, be engaged by the fact that electricity is secretly powering their video games and be motivated to experiment and build a flashlight they can use to secretly read comics under their blankets.

At Champions Science Adventures, fun is at the core of all our lessons. If we make the process of learning science fun, we then make science itself fun and hopefully more appealing to our students.

Andy Allen

“The Science Wiz”

Earlier this past week, we had one of “those” mornings at our house, where everything seemed to go in slow motion, and we were thus forced to make that obligatory dash for the bus. Although my son’s stop is just a few houses down the street, it has proven more effective to jump in the car for that happy chase. This time, though, we had cut it so close that I nearly had to run the bus off the road to get him to notice us and not drive away. Although I certainly could have driven him the 20 extra blocks or so in to school, I think that my competitive drive seems to kick in during this mini race.

Anyway, I digress; so, I sent him on his way, and took just a minute to let my heart rate slow down a bit before jumping on the highway to head in to work, and it gave me a moment to think. I remembered being a kid up in the mountains, and waiting (hoping) for the bus to get stuck on the switchbacks during one of our big snowy mornings. Although many memories that I have of the bus are less than pleasant (the terrible smell for weeks after a kid gets sick on the bus, or getting “moved” to the front of the bus by the older kids), the many hours I spent on the bus as a kid really did teach me some pretty powerful lessons about playing nice with others, reading people, and when to know to not push authority (i.e. the bus driver) too far.

Where I’m really driving this train (or bus) is towards a bigger question about being a kid and gathering many of the big childhood learning neccessities (i.e. knowledge, skills AND attitudes). Although I am (of course) a huge proponent of the online delivery of learning and information, I always try to keep it in the back of my head that kids also need to have very real experiences to learn and grow; and, although many of life’s experiences can be recreated in synchronous and asynchronous online events, experiences like riding the bus 5 days a week for 10 long years of one’s life can be difficult to recreate, so there is clearly a need for a good balance. I suppose the real point is that I feel it’s my responsibility to keep that idea in the back of my mind at all times when I’m creating these fun and/or academic events for children.

Although I’m not sure if we’ll ever catch the bus, I sure am enjoying chase!