Teaching kids to wonder
Milton Academy partners with teen scientist to offer free book
Why does fruit left out in the open “rust” and a pencil placed in a glass of water “bend”? Why can people on opposite sides of a house communicate through two paper cups connected by string?
As a student growing up in India and during the year he spent in kindergarten at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School in Cambridge, Lakshya Kaura wondered. So he became a child scientist, devising experiments to try to answer the questions that swirled inside his head.
Today, at 18, Kaura is the author of a children’s book of experiments aptly called “The Learning of Science Begins With Why?” And, through a partnership with Milton Academy’s Saturday Course, the book is now available for free to youngsters on the Milton.edu site.
“Education should be affordable and it should be fun. This captures both,” said Kristan Burke, director of the Saturday Course, a five-week program for academically advanced students in grades four to eight from throughout the Boston area. “Here we are, doing the same experiments that kids in India are doing. And we have the same needs and wants, the same connection of humanity through a single book.”
The experiments have whimsical titles like “Musical Teeth,” “Balloon Wrestling” and “Magno-Magic” and can be done with inexpensive materials, such as seeds, rubber bands and paper clips.
They’re the kinds of experiments Kaura and other members of his iCube Science Club have conducted in the basement of his home in Old Faridabad, India.
“Having outgrown the do-it-yourself science kits that my dad used to buy for me, and after promising my mother that our house would not blow up,” he said, “I founded the science club” in 2011, at 12.
Kaura pushed the three I’s the club’s name stood for — inquire, imagine and innovate — and began offering hands-on learning, combined with textbook education.
“My basement increasingly became a neighborhood gathering place for youngsters clad in makeshift lab coats,” he said. “Using commonly available materials like balloons, candles, wood and potatoes, we aimed to understand the way things worked, turning magic into science.”
By 14, Kaura was recognized as a top innovator by Google’s Science Fair. Two years later, he became one of the world’s 50 youngest patent holders by inventing a web camera that warns pedestrians wearing headphones when vehicles are moving toward them.
Last year, his explanation of the Doppler effect — the change in the frequency of sound, light or other waves as the source and the observer move toward or away from each other — was published in The Physics Teacher, a journal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
Now that the book is available for free online, Kaura has begun work on his next, “Kitchen-based Learning.”
“I love to cook,” he said. “The kitchen can be a great way to learn science while playing with your taste buds.”