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”