Ben Newsome: You’re listening to the FizzicsEd Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

Ben Newsome: Adam Selinger has been teaching science for over 25 years. He started as a science educator at Questacon in Canberra and has since gone on to work at the Edinburgh Science Festival; he’s run science shows at the United Arab Emirates. He was a co-founder of the Children’s Discovery Center, which ran out of Western Sydney for quite a while. And he’s been running an electronics outreach company called Mad Lab in Australia too.

Look, he’s a busy guy and in this session, we get into talking about how he’s been putting science for preschoolers into Australian libraries, as well as heading up the Early Start Discovery Space out of the University of Wollongong. In this, we talk about not only teaching science, but also the importance of creativity and nurturing a discovery mindset.

Plus, well, just because we can, we start talking about strange science experiments including demonstrating air pressure using cornflakes. Yep, demonstrating air pressure with cornflakes. This is the FizzicsEd Podcast.

Ben Newsome: Hello, welcome to the FizzicsEd Podcast. And really looking forward to this one because I’m speaking with a good friend of mine for many, many years, Adam Selinger. He is a science communication of great standing. He’s done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of science shows and workshops, not only in Australia, but in the UK and around the world, including Canada, China, Indonesia, New Zealand, South Africa, all over the place.

And um look, I’m really looking forward to this. Adam and I get into talking about how he’s been working on his program Little Bangs, which is a program for not only primary kids but actually preschoolers. From the ages 3 to 5 and teaching science in libraries. We talk about his thoughts around creativity in the classroom and what allows kids to actually get excited and you know, learn a bit about their world and their own way. And we also talk about the value of failure in an experiment. Anyway, without further ado, here’s Adam Selinger, who’s the creative director of the Children’s Discovery Museum, as well as heading up the Early Start program at the University of Wollongong.

Ben Newsome: This is the FizzicsEd Podcast for all about science, tech and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. Welcome, Adam Selinger, to the FizzicsEd Podcast.

Adam Selinger: Thank you very much.

Ben Newsome: Thanks very much for coming along, mate. I know it’s been a very busy time what with Easter long weekend, now Anzac Day long weekend, and the kids’ holidays. I imagine it’s been pretty flat out.

Adam Selinger: Yes, yes, yes. It’s crazy. This the school holidays, it’s booking them into all sorts of exciting activities and then playing taxi for, you know.

Ben Newsome: Yeah, that’s right. You’re doing daddy daycare today?

Adam Selinger: I’m doing daddy daycare. Well, actually, no, the kids have just gone back to school, so I did the drop off and I don’t have to worry about them until pick up.

Ben Newsome: Yeah, that’s how working person’s life is these days. No, actually, you actually have had a bit going on. I recently noticed that you launched something up in Newcastle only recently.

Adam Selinger: Well, that’s right. So we’ve got this project where we’re really trying to effectively upskill libraries and librarians in their STEM offerings. And we’ve initiated a project that started in Sydney with just one library and then expanded to about 25. And then we sort of got some inquiries further afield. But it becomes quite time-consuming and expensive to send our people out to run these programs. So we sort of hit on the idea of perhaps we could train librarians themselves to deliver some of our junior programs. We train them and show them how they can get hold of the gear or buy it from us, simple materials. Then they’ll be ready to run these things themselves.

Ben Newsome: This is fantastic. This is the Little Bangs program, right?

Adam Selinger: It is the Little Bangs program. And that’s what just got launched in Newcastle, just the other week.

Ben Newsome: How do you find working with librarians? I mean, librarians are really talented people with a lot of things they’ve got to juggle. How do you find training them in STEM, particularly if they haven’t got a background in it?

Adam Selinger: Well, it’s interesting. It’s a bit of a self-selecting audience. In this case you’re getting the adults who are actually generally quite motivated and keen to do it. Many of them have done something or played in the space already. There is a genuine concern about having a good science knowledge. What we do is we start with a program which we’ve called the Little Bang Discovery Club, and it’s designed for preschool children, sort of between the ages of three and five, and their accompanying adults. So the actual content is very much geared around the learning capabilities of young children and the abilities of non-science background parents/carers to facilitate. It’s a bit of a journey for everyone, which is fine.

Adam Selinger: It’s very kind of fundamental. It’s really a four-week program. It runs for an hour each week, and each session builds on the previous session. It starts with just looking around the room and naming objects. Then it’s collecting bits and pieces and sorting them. Wood, plastic, nature, or just colored paddle pop sticks—we encourage the children and the adults to sort these materials in any way they like. That’s getting across the notion that there’s no right or wrong way of doing this. It’s just a personal choice, what makes sense, or what’s going to be useful.

Ben Newsome: It reminds me of a kid, a mini maker setup in some ways.

Adam Selinger: Well, yeah. These are all those basic skills of sorting objects out. Those skills get reinforced when they go into science clubs and then the maker movement. It makes it very accessible for these children, adult carers, and librarians. It gives everyone the confidence: ‘hey, I can do this. I can think like a scientist.’ The librarians are actually finding this something they can do.

Ben Newsome: The Little Bangs has obviously taken off with 25 odd libraries. Just out of interest, have you ever had pushback from librarians or councils saying science isn’t their thing?

Adam Selinger: Look, it’s interesting, you get this from schools as well. There has been some concerning remarks from librarians saying, ‘oh, no, we couldn’t possibly do science. That’s way too highbrow for our community.’

Ben Newsome: Right, what do you do about that?

Adam Selinger: Well, we recover from the shock, but it does exist. We’ve got to say, look, it’s not science—and we deliberately don’t call it science. It is a discovery club. We just do it by example. Our view is that librarians are the gatekeepers to community knowledge. Libraries are no longer this place of you just borrow books and leave. They have this really growing and critical role as a knowledge center. Libraries are an ideal place for people to gather and not just receive; it’s very two-way.

Ben Newsome: Look, these things are fantastic. Thinking back right to the start, what made you think, ‘I’m just going to be a science communicator’?

Adam Selinger: Well, in a way, your home environment is so influential. There were no lawyers or doctors in my family; I just had scientists. My father’s a scientist, my mother was a communicator. I was influenced by cool things my father would bring home like methylated spirits and burning steamrollers.

Adam Selinger: I grew up in Canberra and was naturally curious. I loved Lego. The idea just to build with whatever you’ve got—testing yourself, ‘what’s the best thing I can build with these limited resources?’ Isn’t that the truth these days? I did science at high school, but choosing a university degree, I chose science subjects of interest to me. Questacon was running public lectures then, and when they moved to the new building, they invited people to train as an explainer. I was an explainer on the floor of Questacon for three years.

Ben Newsome: What was your favorite thing there?

Adam Selinger: Questacon threw together a bunch of like-minded people ranging from 16 to 96. We were trained by Mike Gore to explain physics like the Foucault pendulum, earthquake machines, and biological slides. We were also trained to tell people when we didn’t know things. That was the real buzz.

Ben Newsome: What experiment or two comes to mind that you’ve seen run really well in class with low-tech gear?

Adam Selinger: I joined the Shell Questacon Science Circus traveling to regional and remote parts of Australia. We couldn’t take fancy gear. We could give really effective demonstrations with soap bubbles, balloons, and straws. It’s about the story you weave. You demonstrate the phenomena with low-tech gear to hit the curriculum arc.

Ben Newsome: Absolutely. I was just running a program on variable testing with bubbles. You can deep dive into rainbows and molecular bonding. What’s the funniest thing you’ve seen happen in a classroom?

Adam Selinger: Children want to emulate what you’ve done. We have this audio tube—PVC piping you hold one end and spin around to make sound. To demonstrate air pressure going up, you sit the still end over a bowl of cornflakes.

Adam Selinger: Up the cornflakes go, and it sprays around! In some schools we’ve had eight kids out there with packets of cornflakes running around spraying them everywhere. They got creative trying to see if rocks or pebbles would work—it didn’t, but they were predicting and testing.

Adam Selinger: The greatest thrill is when kids start being creative. In my Mad Lab Electronics workshops, those who finish carefully can then start deconstructing it and changing things around. That’s when they say, ‘I wonder if I can do that.’ Then for me, that’s the outcome. The ultimate thing is when they start thinking for themselves and innovating.

Ben Newsome: Have you ever had a situation where kids just genuinely have a blockage to coming up with something new that isn’t guided by you?

Adam Selinger: Yeah, look, a lot of children will struggle with that. They race through and go, ‘I’ve done it, is this it?’ and want to be done. I want to tear them away from that. One of the things I’ve seen kids struggle with is the idea that ‘there was no result, so it’s wrong.’

Ben Newsome: Like no result is a result! It doesn’t do anything—that is an answer. Top marks actually if you explain why. Research shows teachers often expect a result all the time, but if nothing happens, it’s treated as wrong. That’s not the case.

Adam Selinger: It’s a fine line. At the end of the day, they are children and want to feel good about what they’ve achieved. If something is a failure, they should still feel good because they’ve demonstrated that approach is not going to give us what we want. That is just as valid.

Ben Newsome: Every now and then you’re on stage and things just don’t work. What’s been an outright clanger?

Adam Selinger: Humidity is a killer for soap bubbles. You’re trying to pull a human inside a bubble and they’ve gone stage shy. That’s difficult.

Ben Newsome: I remember a teacher PD where cornflour slime had been replaced by icing sugar without labels. We mixed it away and it was not non-Newtonian slime properties! Label your stuff. If someone started with you at Little Bangs, what advice would you give them about starting to teach science?

Adam Selinger: Know your stuff. Know what you are attempting to convey. Read about it, look at YouTube. So when things go wrong, you can talk your way out of it. Sometimes in shows, I will deliberately make things fail because I want the audience to understand that experts don’t always get things right. Failures are fine. And practice, practice, practice. Know where your stuff is, label it correctly, and practice. You can’t go wrong.

Ben Newsome: If you know your stuff, you can work around nearly anything. We make ours as easily understood as we can for librarians because we don’t want to perpetrate error through Chinese whispers. Children are pretty much the same everywhere—regardless of culture or background. Most parents aren’t from science backgrounds and we create the environment where they ask questions. If the presenter doesn’t know, we’re in a library! We can find the answer here.

Ben Newsome: Great. Is there anything coming up on the horizon?

Adam Selinger: Our big push is activating these libraries. We’re always working on new activities like rat trap racers, treasures of the earth, or visual illusions. We’re also working on big immersive experiences like the Early Start Discovery Space house construction site with genuine tools. We’ve got an archaeological dig site looking at evidence of human habitation to read a story. And the tour of the tummy—entering through the mouth and exiting via the rear!

Ben Newsome: I’ve seen that done brilliantly with crepe paper and sounds in high schools. Thank you so much for coming along, Adam. How can people get in touch with you?

Adam Selinger: Email address is Adam@madlab.org or through the childrensdiscovery.org.au website. Or find me on LinkedIn.

Ben Newsome: That was a great interview. My top three learnings: 1. Use librarians! They have so many resources. 2. Embrace failure. Science is about testing and refining. 3. Create student guided lessons. Allow kids the space to explore. As long as kids are testing variables and get to explore creativity, they will do well. Stretch them with goals. Get creative in your classroom!

Thanks for listening to the FizzicsEd Podcast. Sign up for our newsletter at fizzicseducation.com.au. Subscribe on iTunes and rate us. May your science lessons grab your students’ imagination. Bye for now!