Everyone is a born scientist and artist, even though many do not realise that every task they perform has a scientific and creative basis, such as drawing a picture to building a table. Introducing scientific play and creative play into the curriculum during the early years, inspires and encourages critical thinking, communication, language skills and strengthens their imagination. All people have an exploratory urge to investigate how and why things work and use self-expression and cognitive skills to figure out what is around them. Through doing this all people including children and young people can use all their senses to develop their physical, social, cognitive and emotional thinking. Katherine Johnson (2015), a physicist and mathematician once stated about STEM and how “we will always have [it] with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.”
To bring science and creativity into the 21st century, schools and colleges promote fun learning and mad science. This is brought about by looking at children’s existing interests, such as using building blocks and digging holes in the garden with toy trucks that imitate the adult world. The children provoke their own thinking and if other resources are brought in, for example, colouring, using Play-Doh and Storytime, then this can build and expand the child’s interest. Eventually, concepts grow, and children will explore more freely, asking more questions and searching out more scientific reasoning. This enables and empowers them to become more confident and provide infinite possibilities for creative thinking, problem solving and exploration.
Ken Robinson (2009) believes that “creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.”
Drawing on personal experiences, I have used the scientific play approach whilst working with ©Diamond Dust on school visits and during a Science, Technology, Economics and Mathematics (STEM) day in Margam Park. During these experiences, I have worked with children and young people, using science, technology and the We Do 2.0 LEGO® Education kit to create and build figures, which are also curriculum-based learning. The children and young people used the LEGO® app to show them how the pieces in the kit would fit together and create the figures, which would then connect to the app. This app allows the children and young people to move the figures forwards and backwards, as they are then able to connect a motor, which is placed up on the character. They are adept to use and add sounds to the figures, which using coding can change the colour of the light that is on the ‘on and off’ switch, thereby, the children and young people are using a variety of science-based skills to create these figures. In one particular school, after the class understood how the app works, they began to use their own skills and creativity to create their own figures from scratch that looked completely different to the original models, therefore, these children were able to use the creativity play approach towards their learning of the lesson as they used their own imagination to create and build something without knowing how it would turn out.
Another personal experience I have is through conducting a scientific experiment involving eggs and vinegar. This experiment involved putting the eggs into a glass that was filled with vinegar. This experiment begins a chemical reaction from using acid, which is from the vinegar, to dissolve the calcium carbonate, which is in the shell of the eggs. When the eggs are in the vinegar, they release a carbon dioxide gas, which comes in forms of bubbles that surround the shell of the eggs. The results of the eggs are that the eggs themselves are unbroken and continue to look the same, however, the shell of the eggs become very thin and breakable as they turn into two delicate membranes.