Science Portal

The science fairs of 2009 are well underway. I hope as parents and community volunteers, we're embracing this opportunity instead of cringing. It's a lot of work from start to finish. Just finding a worthy experiment can be a job in itself. No matter what age group you encourage, it's no small task to come home from work, roll up your sleeves, and support that young adult from hypothesis, to research, to finished project. It does them no good for us to get too involved; yet the need for distant guidance is quite a tug. After all, we know how to do it, right?

I bet we don't. If we had all the answers, all our scientific enigmas would be solved already! The only thing requiring more patience than teaching a child is sparking their desire to learn. Maybe what needs to be sparked first, is a basic understanding of why that should matter to us.

Our Eyes On Science

So many changes happen in a lifetime. Our grandfather's generation saw the crank engine model A drive down dirt roads. Some older farmhouses still exist today that were once only lit by candles and lamps. That generation saw the invention of the radio and television, and lived to see the cell phone and computer, possibly even the Ipod. If corrective lenses were prescribed, they were a quarter inch thick.

Today's inventions are yesterday's science projects. Take eyes for example. Who would have thought a laser could be aimed at your eyes, and improve the condition of the eye, not destroying it? Who realized you could actually stick something in your eyes daily for better sight?

Science Fair Projects and Visual Perception

Elementary science fair projects are already tackling visual perception. That category is quite extensive. These k-5, and even sixth grade kids can learn about the optic nerve, not just as anatomy is concerned, and that's important, but also how periphery affects our judgment of colors and spatial understanding. Taking no more than a 1x2 ft cardboard, and some simple items found around the house, they basically hold a half moon cut out to their nose, and learn at what angle colors and detailed shapes become recognizable in their peripheral vision.

Another project dealing with visual perception is pupil dilation. With a mirror, magnifying glass, and a flashlight, they can see how the pupil changes size to control how much light enters the eye. That's cool, but guess what they're doing by high school, if guided and encouraged, and most of all, interested?

By high school they're testing the visual ability to judge size using two references in comparison, maps and graphs. They take control groups, sometimes up to 25 in each, and have them study maps to make size comparisons. Then they do the same thing with graphs, and ask comparison questions to each group. They have to learn how to arrange data in both formats. For the maps group, subjects are asked to discriminate between several different sizes with different borders. The graphs group must draw conclusions about size based on data. The information for both control groups is changed to confuse them. Participants in the control groups are ultimately asked to rank in size from smaller to larger, using only their particular information.

Why Does That Matter?

By the time these kids are going off to college, they're using the learned methodology of test subjects, control groups, and hypothesis making to ask the bigger visual perception questions. Our scientific community is already studying connections between ocular impairment and visual perception to Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and stroke. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then it might be possible to catch these conditions through eye examinations while they are still curable.

These will be our eyes, and our kids will be the scientists making these discoveries. And it just may have started in elementary school.