PhotoS: Supplied.
“Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” Albert Einstein.
For those of us who, as students, wrestled (often unsuccessfully) with science, having access to someone like Ruben Meerman would have been a great advantage. Ruben, the Surfing Scientist, is equally at home in the surf, in a laboratory, or on a stage. An acclaimed science communicator, he sees multiple benefits to opening young minds to scientific concepts.
“Kids want to learn science, it feeds their natural curiosity. If you ask kids, ‘What would you like to learn today?’ they won’t ask to learn more spelling or more about fractions – they’ll opt for things like dinosaurs, volcanoes or space. If you can work with that, you have kids who are happy about learning, and you can use those lessons to introduce the other stuff about fractions, new words and spelling, a bit like a Trojan Horse, as part of a whole thematic unit.”
Ruben says that working with little kids is the best training for a science communicator.
“You have to use ‘normal person speak’ – no jargon or technical words. The beauty of working with little kids is that if you’re boring them, they’ll let you know! If you’re losing them, it’s not their fault; you need to think about your presentation. It’s got to be exciting and big and within their realm of understanding.
“We’re all entertained by visuals, and they’re a great hook for kids,” he says. “For a show, you need things that go pop and bang, but I like to give them a roller coaster of some pop and bang, then an explanation of safety measures and what could go wrong if they try these things at home.
“It gets serious then; they really love hearing about how you could potentially die if you do the wrong thing – then we go back to more pop and bang, keeping them swinging between laughter and serious thought.”
On the question of serious thought Ruben says there are many big questions to keep kids engaged and they’re usually about what we don’t know rather than what we do.
“Why don’t we live forever? Why do we need to sleep? We know what happened immediately after the Big Bang, but what about immediately before the Big Bang? The universe is expanding, but what if we turned the process around and went backwards until it was just a speck – what then?” Ruben says that science opens up young people to learning in general and can unlock doors to lots of professions.
“I impress on them that to do anything useful with what they learn or discover, they’ll need reading and writing and maths and communication skills. Communication is so important to all of us; we’re all humans, storytelling animals. We all love this stuff, no matter what our age, and we respond so much better to a story than to just a presentation of cold, hard facts. I always introduce someone’s story into the presentation – something to make audiences realise that there was a real person involved in these discoveries.”
Redlands Coast Museum is expecting the usual mass involvement at Ruben’s Switch on to Science 2025 Science Week presentation on Redlands Ekka Day, Monday, August 11. For more information, visit redlandscoastmuseum.org.au.
