Museum highlights informal learning
Members of Hot Springs National Park Rotary Club got a firsthand and up-close lesson in physics last week courtesy of Mid-America Science Museum’s education director as he demonstrated the effectiveness of informal learning.
Doug Herbert used interactive science experiments and humor during his presentation at the Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa on Wednesday, explaining that such a learning style gets people excited about science.
“The way we generally think about any kind of education is almost always a lecture format,” Herbert said. “The teacher stands up, the teacher talks about what the kids are supposed to learn, the kids write it down and they memorize it. Informal learning is more about hands-on
methodology, or pedagogy, if you will.”
Herbert conducted his experiments in front of the speaking podium and incorporated Rotary members into the action to illustrate his point, noting, “I do not lecture. I do not tell you what’s going on. I need to show you. That’s what informal learning is all about.”
In the first experiment, Rotary member Clay Farrar was brought up to have a contest with Herbert to see who could blow up a diaper bag more quickly, illustrating the Bernoulli Effect.
Herbert explained that by opening the mouth of the bag and blowing in from a distance, his breath created a vortex, as seen in tornadoes and hurricanes. He illustrated the point by taking a trash bag with a hole in the bottom and its top covered by a shower curtain and filling it with smoke and beating the covered end, creating smoke rings.
Isaac Newton’s laws of thermodynamics were depicted through Herbert trying to drop a tennis ball in a bucket while running past it, having Rotarian Ernie Hinz compare the weight of a basketball to a bowling ball — and nearly hitting Rotarian Les Warren in the face with the same bowling ball, which was swinging from a chain.
The concepts behind the laws illustrated in these experiments were inertia, mass and friction. Herbert said he has found such a hands-on approach to explaining science to be the most effective.
“There’s different methods that human beings learn,” he said. “There are some that learn by reading, others do it visually, others do it auditory, but most human beings do it kinetically, meaning through action. They’ve gotta do a thing in order to get a thing, and that’s what informal science education has been doing for quite a while.”
Herbert’s presentation showed how such informal learning manages to engage adults and children alike.
“As adults get older, our brains become a little bit less flexible, and sometimes, just the novelty of learning it in a different way helps us gather more information and have it stored in our long-term memory,” he said. “It’s a great method for adults to learn how to do things well.”