Beau Lotto&Amy O'Toole / Science is for everyone, kids included

Welcome back, incredible BookDuck fans. Let's discover the importance of involving children in scientific exploration and discovery through the TED talk by neuroscientist Beau Lotto and young published scientist Amy O'Toole. They believe science should not be restricted to a select group of experts but should be accessible to everyone, especially younger generations.

They speak about perception, play, and experimentation in the context of science.

Beau Lotto begins his talk by speaking about perception grounded in our experience. Our brain takes meaningless information and makes meaning out of it. Did you know we never see actual information? We only see what was useful to see in the past. Perception underpins everything we think, know, believe, etc. Almost everything begins with perception. It is grounded in our history, and we always respond based on what has happened before. But that raises a problem, which means we always see the same.

And when it comes to new perceptions they begin with questions, but the thing with that is that they create uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very bad thing. Your brain can't deal with uncertainty and gets ill. Do you want to know what's one of the most dangerous things you can ask? It's the question of why. And if you are wondering Why? Well, it's because it takes you to uncertainty. Well, then, what's the solution to uncertainty? It's play.

Play is one of the only human endeavors where uncertainty is celebrated. Uncertainty is what makes play fun. It opens room for changes and possibilities. It's also cooperative and intrinsically motivated, and that's how we do our social bonding. These characteristics of play also define what it takes to be a good scientist.

Science is not defined by a method on paper; it's a way of being and is also creative. When you add rules to play, you have a game. That's also what an experiment is. Since science is a way of being and experiments are played, then the question is can anyone be a scientist? Well, to answer the question, there was a study conducted which aimed for kids to see science differently.

The young girl involved in the study was Amy O'Toole, who is actually one of the youngest published scientists in the world and also the youngest person ever to be giving a TED talk today. She joins Beau Lotto to tell the story of the "Blackawton Bees Project."

She first begins with the question they came up with, which was if bees and humans might solve complex problems in the same way. What if bees can think like us? The next step was to design an experiment which was a game. For this, they created a puzzle where the bees had to go to a certain color flower only. Beau and O'Toole both didn't know if it would work. It was a completely new experiment, and no one had done it before. During this process, students observe and take notes, and do calculations.

The next step is to share. It consists of four sections, introduction, methods, results, and discussion. It took four months to do the science and two years to get it published, which makes Amy and her friends the youngest published scientists in the world.

And if you're wondering about the feedback of the people, well, it was downloaded 30,000 times in the first day. It was the Editor's Choice in Science, which is a top science magazine.

Now, what’s the big takeaway from all of this? Well, science is about taking risks. And this one was a great example of an incredible risk. Science helps us walk through life and step into uncertainties. It also offers to step on uncertainty through the process of play.

To sum up, they speak about science and how they believe science education should be about giving people a voice and enabling them to express that voice. Last but not least, everyone, including you, has the potential to discover something new, and even the smallest question can lead to a big discovery. Now you know that science is not just a boring subject, but it's a platform to discover something new. All you need is an opportunity; now let's go search for it together.