Studying rocks, a new capital city and drilling into the ocean floor
Indonesia is building a new capital, Nusantara, but why on earth would you do that? What will happen to the people, the forest, the water and the proboscis monkeys that already live there? And what would your new capital look like?
Kei Otsuki, Femke van Noorloos and their Indonesian colleague Ari Susanti, who happens to be in the Netherlands this week, discussed this with the children at the Cammingha School in Bunnik. “So you’ll all get new classmates,” and “then you’ll need loads of cranes”. They also had a good solution for the monkeys: they could all come and live in the Netherlands.
After some explanation about the new city in Indonesia, the children were allowed to draw their own city. Quite hard, with a blank sheet of paper in front of you. But after a bit of help and thinking along about what they’d like to do in that city, what they like, or what’s important, they soon got drawing. A green island, a swimming pool, an ice-cream shop, or a huge palace.
The fact that three researchers from three different countries are visiting is particularly fun. “Can you say something to us in Japanese? And in Indonesian?” And looking at Femke: “Oh well, we know Dutch.”
Chromatography in the classroom
A 15-million-year-old shell? The children at De Klimroos Primary School in Leidsche Rijn react with disbelief and awe when Francesca Sangiorgi tells them about her rarest find to date. Together with Francien Peterse, she talks about methods for studying the climate in the distant past, and what we can learn from this about the future. To illustrate this, Peterse has come up with a clever analogy: that of the school bell.
“Your school bell always rings at half past ten, but how do I know that?” asks Peterse. “Because that’s how it is every day. And so I also know that it will be the same tomorrow. So how could we say anything about the climate of the future?” By looking at what happened in the past, comes the clever answer from one of the children. It sets the tone for an hour of witty answers, thought-provoking questions (“Do you have a lot of free time?”) and a successful introduction to the world of chromatography.
The core of this ‘Meet the Professor’ session is explaining to the children how we can know what the climate was like in a time when there were no thermometers. And that the ‘history book’ of the ocean floor can tell us a great deal about those long-gone times. A tried-and-tested method for illustrating drilling into the ocean floor is, of course, that of the apple corer, which takes a sample of the “sediment layers” from a slice of lapis legit, the Indonesian layer cake, as Sangiorgi demonstrates.
Peterse then hands out cups, marker pens, cocktail sticks and pieces of paper. The children draw a series of dots at the bottom of the paper, push a cocktail stick through the top, hang the paper in a cup in this way, into which Peterse pours a little water, and voilà, the water creeps upwards, revealing the distinctive colours of the dots. But that’s apparently not enough, according to one of the more critical girls in the class: she wants to have her piece of paper analysed even further in Francien’s lab!
Questions come not only from the class (“How did you get into this kind of work? Can I come along on that boat sometime? Are you ever going to stop?”) but also from the researchers. For example, what the children will say about this lesson when they get home, or whether they think Francesca and Francien look like researchers. “No, well, you’re wearing glasses.”
Preferably in a gown
Laurens Kleijbeuker (a PhD student from the HPT lab) and Hans de Bresser visited class 7A at the Prinses Margriet School in Nieuwegein. The theme was: how do you study rocks?
Hans started out in his everyday clothes, but the children really wanted to see him dressed in a gown. As soon as he put it on, the reaction was immediate: “You look just like Harry Potter!”
After dividing the class into groups, the pupils set off on a discovery tour of four different types of rock. It’s always fantastic to see how many keen observations an open mind can yield. For instance, they cautiously licked rock salt, resulting in a unanimous “yuck!”, and a drop of diluted hydrochloric acid on limestone caused amazement: “It’s fizzing!”
One group went a step further and wondered aloud whether rock salt might dissolve in water. Not long after, a piece of salt had been placed in a glass, ready to be examined. Real researchers.
Every spring, researchers from Utrecht University visit primary school classes in the Utrecht region. Professors, laboratory technicians, lecturers, PhD students and undergraduates put themselves in the shoes of pupils in Years 6, 7 and 8 by letting the children conduct the research themselves – from interviewing to pipetting and philosophising. In this way, over 3,400 children a year gain a realistic insight into science, whilst researchers discover new perspectives on their research.