👩🔬An Interview with Our Experts 👨🔬
We released a new story theme! ...What's a story theme?
👋Hi, friend!
I hope you’re doing well and staying healthy!
I’m back with the fourth edition of the Kide Science newsletter, and I figured you might be sick of hearing from just me. It’s a real team effort over here. We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled ideas for bringing STE(A)M Education into your home next week.
Instead, this week, I’ve brought you both an announcement and interview with our pedagogical experts. In less fancy words, that means “the insanely smart people that create our lessons.”
The announcement: We’ve released a new story theme called Mrs Noblegas’s Floury Dilemma (MNFD)!
Some quick notes about what that means:
A story that ties all of the experiments and lessons together (to help recall and enthusiasm)
10 Lessons and 27 experiments that include making sorbet, programming a robot (Assistant to the Assistant Robot, an homage to Dwight Shrute), and creating a dough monster (ARGHH!)
Discussion tips and explanations for you to guide your little scientist(s)
We know it can be hard to tell what exactly a story theme is, and why it’s our preferred way to teach science. To help shine a little light on what we’re talking about, I’ve invited two members of our team, Aino Kuronen and Unni Pulliainen, to answer some questions. We discuss:
What a story theme is
Some favorite experiments
An experiment that kids would love and parents would hate (we nixed it; you’re welcome 😂)
Aino is one of our cofounders, and a pedagogical expert. She’s also a former Tedx speaker, a former teacher, and a staunch opponent of standardized testing.
Unni is one of our Pedagogical Developers, holds PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and knows more about ants than any human should.
How long would you say that we’ve been working on this story theme?
Aino: It took about about two months to turn the lessons into something young scientists can do in the home. We do something, we iterate, we re-iterate and realize it is so awesome that we make a new product of it 😎. The point is to never stop growing, never stop implementing new ideas and kill your darlings in the process, if that is necessary. We got feedback from our customers and combined some of our favorite lessons to become the story theme we’re releasing today.
Unni: You mean from the first idea to the finished product? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer. This was first a product for our Finnish customers (ed note: teachers and science clubs), and now many months later we have designed a version of it for families.
Empathy and willingness to help is a skill and a quality that can never be highlighted enough.
Let me backup: How would you describe what a story theme is?
A: A story theme is a set of 10 lessons, each of which then has between one to three experiments. A story theme, as the name suggests, connects the lessons with a story.
U: Perhaps you could think of it as a book, with the separate lessons as chapters in the book. The experiments then in the lessons might be from completely different fields and topics. However, some story themes might also be focused on certain topics. For example Mrs Noblegas’s Floury Dilemma has a lot of kitchen chemistry experiments, but also lessons on coding, mathematics, etc.
How did you decide on this story theme?
A: Kitchen science is something we embrace because it is very concrete, everyday life things that you can then realize are actually science!
U: I think we had collected lots of ideas about great kitchen-related experiments and wanted to make a story theme out of those - combining funny and odd things that could happen in Mrs Noblegas’s experimental kitchen, and making a story out of it.
Which comes first: the experiments or the story?
A: Both. Sometimes we start from the story and sometimes from the experiments. It could also be that we want to address and be capable of providing something for a specific curriculum. The other story theme (coming soon!) is a very wild story, but MNFD came from the experiments.
U: Sometimes one, sometimes the other. The process really varies. In this case, we had a bunch of the experiments ready, and the story around them almost writes itself. Then we had ideas for other parts of the story, and we started looking for experiments that could suit it, either from experiments we have used previously and want to update, or look for completely new ones. So we do both: build a story around the experiments as well as come up with nice experiments to take the story to the next stage. I personally really enjoy this method, to be able to do both. Sometimes the freedom of just coming up with an exciting story is thrilling, and sometimes it is super fun to come up with a story to bring a simple experiment alive.
How did you test the experiments?
A: We do testing in our nearby kindergarten and the teachers have been lovely and helpful with that. We can make a phone call on Tuesday and they might take us in on Wednesday. The children looooooove Hoseli (ed note: Hoseli is the robot whose shenanigans drive the story behind the experiments) which is another proof that the narratives work. We also get feedback from the kindergarten teachers who said that sometimes, an experiment itself is not enough to engage the children - the narrative is the thing that brings it to life.
What also amazed me was that they were looking at the picture of Supraland (ed note: the fictional world where our lessons take place) after the lesson and continuing the story through the picture together!
“Yes, then Hoseli would jump into the stream and it would be a water slide and then they would slide into the Supraland universe!”
It was a very humbling moment because it was the first time the kids had heard our story.
U: A few months ago, we were all working from home (COVID and all...) and having an online meeting to discuss new experiments. While we were talking, one of us set up the Dough Creatures experiment, where yeast and dough was supposed to grow in a glass, covered with a glove. This experiment had not worked well the previous time we tested it - the dough had not risen almost at all - so we were a bit pessimistic, but left the dough creature to rise anyway.
Well, we forgot about it. Fortunately, we remembered just as the monster was about to explode. The yeast had risen all the way up to the glove and would have burst out any minute if we didn’t remember it just in time. There was no harm done, and through this test we realized what had gone wrong the previous time. Never forget your Dough Creature.
What is your favorite experiment in this set of lessons?
A: I love the experiment in Lesson 7: Dough Creatures. It is an experiment done with yeast, warm water and some sugar. Yeast is basically living bacteria that eats carbohydrates, and if we apply some heat, moisture and sugar with yeast, it starts producing carbon dioxide - in children’s words: Bubbles! It can expand a lot, and that’s why it helps you get some fluffiness into your baked goods. One of us - I can’t remember who it was - had a lovely idea to make it even more engaging. We added a plastic glove in which we draw eyes in it, and it actually looks like a monster that starts living when there’s more and more gas inside. We’ve also seen how engaging this is for the kids, which is amazing.
U: Hmm. Wow, this is harder than I thought. Perhaps Instant Freezer (Lesson 10)? In the experiments, the children invent a freezer, and get to make and eat sorbet. At the same time, they help one of the characters to feel better, that’s always such a nice feeling when the children truly go through the emotions and work hard to come up with a way to help someone else. Empathy and willingness to help is a skill and a quality that can never be highlighted enough, be it towards a fictional character or not.
Were there any lessons that didn’t make the cut?
A: There always are. I remember that we were thinking of doing some experiment on air pressure: putting water inside a glass, placing some cardboard on top of the glass and then turning the glass upside down. The cardboard should magically stay in place, but if there’s just the smallest amount of air between the cardboard and the glass...it’s a huge mess. We figured it might be too stressful for the parents (and might encourage some risky behavior from kids when parents aren’t around!).
U: Always. Those we save in an idea bank and hope to use in the next themes we write.
Let’s Teach Some Science
If you’re interested in Mrs Noblegas’s Flourly Dilemma, it’s €19.90 for 6 months of access. (I bet if you asked nicely and gave us some feedback, we’d be willing to extend that, too…)
We also have a weather-based theme called (appropriately) Kelvin’s Weather Adventure. It’s also €19.90.
(FYI: As of this morning, €19.90 converts to $23.66, per Google. We’re working on a solution that converts the price to dollars. We’re new, bear with us. Your kindness is greatly appreciated.)
If you’re interested in seeing some lessons in action, we have a remote science camp coming up. For 1 hour each day during the week of September 14, Aino, Unni and others will be leading a class of 10 in some remote lessons. It’s normally $50, but newsletter subscribers can get $25 off by clicking the button below, or using the code “bornscientist”.
If you want to try-before-you-buy, we also have a free lesson happening Thursday (September 3rd) at 3pm Helsinki Time (that’s 8am ET, for our East Coast friends). You can register via the Google Form here.
I don’t mean to do the whole OMG BUY NOW!!! thing, but we’re capping both activities at 10 students, so … maybe buy now?
That’s all for this week! See you next Monday
Happy Experimenting,
Grafton & The Kide Science Team
Interesting! What's the connection or differences between Kide Science's Story Theme Base and the typical Finnish Phenomenon Based Learning?