Christmas, 1965, and an 11-year-old boy eagerly rips open the paper from a large parcel he’d been eying under the tree for what seemed like most of the Advent period. Too small to be a Scalextric, too big to be a Hornby Dublo Intercity engine. Once the box was exposed, it must have taken a good few second for its contents to register: it was a Philips Electronic Kit.
Now, my family were neither scientific nor even remotely academic. I hadn’t, until then, shown the slightest inclination towards the life scientific, and yet here I was with this contraption designed for 14-year-olds. But wait. Apparently, from this Pandora’s box I could create a flashing beacon, a radio, an organ, a morse code trainer, a pilfering alarm (sic), a gramophone amplifier, and a further fourteen devices. And each successfully completed circuit promised to take me one step closer to my vision of the future: the world of ‘Supercar’, ‘Fireball XL5’, ‘Stingray’ and ultimately, the amazing ‘Thunderbirds’.
Okay, my aspiration bar may have been set a little high but, following an uncertain start, most of the circuits worked, albeit in a somewhat limited manner. But I was hooked. There followed a rapid succession of increasingly complex construction projects mainly gleaned from my Practical Electronics magazine subscription.
The 65 page manual that accompanied that first kit contained the schematic diagrams, which strictly was all that was needed to build the circuits, but the wiring diagrams were also included, as well as full explanations of how each circuit worked. The substantial appendices even explained Ohm’s Law, capacitance and inductance, and electrons and holes. The 11-year-old boy didn’t follow any of those bits, but he did learn Morse code, and he sent innumerable messages to anyone in the room who could hear the buzzer. (Well, it didn’t seem pointless at the time!)
Five years later and my father is driving me back home from Manchester. I am excitedly holding a black cardboard box. Inside it is a grey pvc box which splits open to reveal a British Thornton slide rule. Not a toy, I accept, but with the beauty of its detailed scales and the velvety motion of the cursor and slider, to me it was a cross between a finely constructed piece of sculpture and a beautiful mechanical toy. For the following year, I’d use the slide rule to multiply numbers quicker than the alternative longhand or log table methods, though of course, I wasn’t allowed to use it in exams (sound familiar?). Then, for the next three years, I’d use it to calculate square roots, trig functions and finally, exponentials. The device played a significant part in my life over those four years. But then I went to university to study electronics and immediately bought a Sinclair Scientific calculator kit (and a bass guitar). The slide rule design, which had been in continuous use for three-hundred and fifty years, was abruptly expunged by the logic gate in 1974.
Hence to my working life, and for the past 40 years I have, for the most part, been modelling. Not with balsa wood or polycarbonate, but with computers – which, I assure you, is a lot more fun. Over the decades, I’ve modelled electron transit times, the weather, microwave antennas and systems and, for the past decade, sports projectiles. My current analysis is based on using low-dimensional topological methods to calculate the respective lengths of the two Scalextric track slots as a function of circuit layout.
I have to say that, out of all the modelling areas I’ve been involved in, modelling javelins and shuttlecocks have been by far the most fun and academically stimulating. If I was to justify the point in a mature and professional manner, I’d say that working in this area is rewarding because the scale and characteristic of the objects being modelled allow for easy and accurate verification, and the forces acting on the projectiles create some intriguing families of equations of motion. If, on the other hand, you want the brutal truth, it’s because serving a tennis ball, taking a penalty kick or potting a snooker ball while being filmed with several high-speed cameras in the name of cutting-edge research is, well, bloody fun!
The point I’m making is twofold. First, by being given access to these toys at particular stages in my development, I was ‘accidentally’ introduced to key concepts (such as electron-hole pairs and exponential functions) well in advance of their formal planned educational treatment. This must have given me an educational advantage over those students who had later met the ideas for the first time in a formal classroom environment.
Second, we can look to evolution to point us to the best way to learn. Playing starts when a baby is old enough to see and manipulate their limbs. Playing is exciting and it sates our curiosity like no other activity. Show me a scientist who is not driven by curiosity and I’ll show you a… well, not a scientist, anyway.
Gradually – and I know this is hardly an original argument – as we advance through key stages, year-on-year, we are taught in an increasingly structured manner, and playing as a means of learning is discouraged. Of course, formal planned education has its place, but there is a balance to be struck and, at the moment, the greater mass is firmly on the Govian side of the fulcrum.
Playing in, and with, science is about the power of serendipitous learning.
Image: A shuttlecock and badminton racquet. (Credit: Philip MacKenzie.) Working on the physics of projectiles in sport can be both fun and intellectually rewarding.
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