Science, Engineering and Getting a Feel for Stuff: essential lessons for the nation - Prof Neil A Downie MA PhD

SATRO is privileged to work with nearly 1,000 volunteers from all areas of the working world, including many hundreds of scientists and engineers, one of our regular supporters has given us his views on what today’s candidates of all parties, should be thinking about, do tell us what you think...

The shortage of a thousand GPs in the next five years is a serious problem that has been well covered in the media.  What isn’t covered in the media is much, much more serious; it is a slow motion disaster, nearly a thousand times more serious than the shortage of doctors.  It is the million or more shortfall expected in scientists, professional engineers and technicians in the next five years.  

We need  a million people with a ‘feel for stuff’, people who have almost unconscious feel for the real physical world, a  feel for what will work and what won’t.  Recently, I interviewed 20 people for a job and rejected nearly all of them because they simply didn’t have that practical feel.  They had the qualifications, the personal qualities, and they wanted to do the job.  However, they wouldn’t have the confidence to design something that was new, that was a little different from what had gone before. 

Too many young people are missing out on getting hands-on with practical things related to science and engineering at an age when abilities are naturally absorbed.  Between the ages of 10 and 18, roughly, if someone has the chance to make things, to do practical tests and experiments, to see how things work by taking them apart, the chance to design something new and improved perhaps, then they will get that magical  ‘feel for stuff’.  This practical work will complement their academic studies.  If you use something you have learned, or learn about something you have used, then you will remember it.  And, what is more, remember it in a way that that means that you will never forget it, and in a way that you will be able to use it.

I tried out sending coded messages with a group of primary school children last week.  They learnt some great practical stuff about sending messages down wires and the hardware to do that (it involved calculators: what I call a ‘Calculator Communicator’).  Meanwhile a whole lesson in Maths, English and the alphabet was being sneaked past them as they wrote down and coded, transmitted and decoded messages.

So let’s have a campaign for parents, for teachers, for students: it is vital that they understand this issue and how it affects them.  Let’s have a campaign to train our primary teachers: no primary school should be left without a teacher with the ability to do practical science, to make things and show kids how to make things, to show them how things work.   And let’s have a campaign to put science and engineering firmly on the agenda  - and the curriculum - of all schools. 

We need to get our youngsters busy with saw and soldering iron, taking apart broken Hoovers and printers, and busy making things.  Those things may or not work well as hardware, but will in either case teach our children lessons essential for them and for the nation. 

- Prof Neil A Downie MA PhD