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Science really is child’s play

RSBL201fig2 - Adobe Reader.JPGPosted on behalf of Tiffany O’Callaghan.

Kids have a natural fascination about the world around them, but it isn’t often this curiosity gets channelled into peer-reviewed scientific papers.

A group of 8- to 10-year-olds from Blackawton School in Devon are doing their best to change that. Their findings, published today in the peer-reviewed Royal Society journal Biology Letters, offer modest new insight into how the Buff-tailed Bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) perceives the world. And, though their research is written up in “kids speak” and lacks the traditional accoutrement of references to previous research or historical context, their champions and reviewers alike insist that it is sound science. Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at University College London’s Institute of Opthalmology and one of the two adult co-authors (the other is Dave Strudwick, head teacher at the kids’ school), says simply: “The paper wasn’t published just because it was kids.”

According to the accompanying commentary by Laurence Maloney of the Center for Neural Science at New York University and Natalie Hempel de Ibarra, whose research at the University of Exeter explores the sensory world of bees and other insects, the findings offer “novel insight in the colour and pattern vision of the bee”.

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So, for all of the kudos, how did they do it, and what exactly did the kids reveal? To begin with, Lotto, who is also head of a lab aimed at using science to promote empathy, encouraged the kids to view the scientific process a form of organized play. The children came to see experiments as games in which the rules help you ask questions. (To drive home this point the kids participated in simple experiments for which they weren’t given any instructions – much as bees wouldn’t be given any instructions to games they’d design.) They were then encouraged to start thinking widely about what questions they might ask a bee.

Once they had decided upon a central question for the bees – can they use the spatial relationships between coloured flowers to determine which ones contain sugar? – they set out to design a “game” to see how the bees might answer this. (Lotto prompted them by asking: “What if you wanted to ask someone a question but you couldn’t actually talk to them, what would you do?”) With the grown-ups help, they made four different panels within a plexi-glass “bee arena.” Each panel had 16 circular holes over a light box, and each circle was equipped with a small plexi-glass rod that could hold either sugar water, salt water or nothing.


After an initial period in which each circle contained sugar water – to train the bees that each circle was a “flower” – the kids marked five different bees with coloured dots and began the experiments. In the series of experiments, they changed the colours and patterns of colours of the circles, and also changed which contained sugar water. They then recorded how the bees used each previous experience in the box to determine where to alight. They found that, not only were the bees capable of solving puzzles, but that the individual bees did so slightly differently and with differing rates of success. “They had learned to solve the puzzle using different rules,” the kids point out, concluding that the bees relied on a combination of pattern recognition, colour and even personal preference.

“What is novel in the experiment presented here is that bees learned colour and pattern cues in a spatially complex scene composed of two-coloured local and global patterns,” note Maloney and Hempel de Ibarra in their commentary. “Coloured patterns at small and large spatial scales have been little studied, and hence our knowledge of how colourful patterns and scenes are perceived by insects is still scarce.”

The primary school children’s research not only went some way to addressing that scarcity of understanding, but also toward opening the world of scientific research, Lotto says. The study may not mark a major leap forward in scientific understanding, but it was well designed, correctly executed and the findings are genuinely novel. And while the presentation certainly wouldn’t have gotten any PhD candidates published, the research demonstrates that with the right thinking and encouragement, anyone can be a scientist. As Lotto puts it, “If an amateur, or someone who doesn’t know the historical scientific context makes a discovery, does that mean the science isn’t relevant?”

Comments

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    Matthew Britton said:

    This is amazing! Get kids off of war-faring video games and out into Nature. Congratulations to the young ’uns who creatively performed this work, keep it up!

  2. Report this comment

    Adam said:

    “Get kids off of war-faring video games and out into Nature”

    Ah, good, peaceful, kind Nature. With the parasites and the baby-eating and the slow lingering deaths from starvation and disease. So much better for young minds than video games.(!)

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    Ding Yuan said:

    It is so amazing and wonderful! I congratulat these kids and this type training. Despit I am a chinese, from this report, I still ridicule the Chinese education and some Chinese research. I hope that some so-called scientist should seriously read this report.

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    Hatice Duzkale said:

    Congratulations to all the kids and their coach! This is a very creative and well-controlled study; I am amazed by the quality of the experiments. I am a graduate student and I think this study could well serve as a masters thesis only if the language were not so cute throughout the paper:) I can see the Nobel laureates at play…

    Dr. Lotto, you certainly inspired me for inspiring the children. Thank you!

    All the best,

    Hatice Duzkale

    UT MD Anderson Cancer Center

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    Naveen Kaushik said:

    It is the example of real free mind full of innovation.

    I congratulat these kids and this type training.

    At this stage there no lobbing but as u grow up though will covered up.

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    Aseem Mishra said:

    Science has always been about simplicity. Its just that we have been overlooking this philosophy of science. Thanks to the kids for reminding that to us. And congratulations to their mentors for inculcating this love for doing science. Best of luck.

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