Students Motivated by Learning Scientists Struggled to Find Success

Solutions to the world's problems haven't come to famous scientists without a struggle. A study at Columbia University and the University of Washington should give students, especially young women, courage to apply themselves to the task of becoming a scientist. The study found that reading about the failures of famous scientists motivated students not only to pursue studies in science and math but also to improve their performances in all academic studies.

     Artist Teresita Fernandez, a recipient of a $500,000 genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, goes so far as to suggest something unique and valuable can come from failure. She relates the Japanese idea of kintsugi, "to patch with gold," a practice of using gold to repair a broken bowl. That way the new bowl resembles nothing but itself. Failures unique to an individual can lead to something valuable, if that person keeps pressing forward.

So, what are some of the books that can motivate students to keep pressing forward?

• Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine by Laurie Wallmark and April Chu

Although Ms. Lovelace had to overcome temporary blindness from measles, this daughter of Lord Byron wrote the first computer program after she met Charles Babbage and understood how his first mechanical computer worked.

• Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian by Margarita Engle and Julie Paschkis

In the 17th century, Maria Merian had to work in secret to show butterflies weren't evil creatures that sprang out of mud.

• Primates by Jim Ottoviani and Maris Wicks

To make discoveries about primates, students suffered through many hardships living and working in the African bush with Richard Leakey.

• Brilliant Blunders by Mario Livio

Livio describes scientists who made colossal mistakes before making progress.

Just last summer, when my granddaughter was an intern in a zoology lab, she learned that every day she had to overcome the spiders that wove new webs overnight in the cages of the birds she was studying.

Kids Can Exchange How-to Info

I've seen kids in South Africa pushing wire cars that look as though they've been made from coat hangers. And then there are those intricate kites flown in Asia and the Origami swans children float on ponds. When I learned how maple syrup is made by reading the prize-winning essay written by a young student, I realized kids around the world could learn a lot from each other by exchanging how-to information.

     Maybe you read about a student who made a clock out of a potato. How do you do that? Or how do you make a simple robot or put together a 1000-piece puzzle? How do you use berries to make a natural dye?

     Sure, it is possible to find answers to some of these questions from anonymous sources on the Internet, but, as a global citizen, the experience of learning how to do something new from a person in another country is much more interesting and fun. Some young people could describe how they made a connection with kids in other countries through YouTube, ePals (See the earlier post, "Getting to Know You."), or the Maker Movement (See the post, "I Made This Myself.").

     In case you're interested in making maple syrup, here's what I learned from that young man in Waupaca, Wisconsin, USA. Three weeks before spring, find a maple tree which is at least 10 inches in diameter. After drilling a hole 2 inches deep, you insert a spike and hang a bucket on it to collect sap. Eventually you take the bucket to a sugar shack, where the sap is boiled down over a very hot wood fire. I takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.

International Flight Fatalities

When Egyptian Air Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo went down in the Mediterranean Sea on May 19, 2016, efforts to find the lost passengers and plane required a coordinated international search reminiscent of the continuing search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean.

     What comparisons could a student make? The main countries studying Flight MS804's crash are Egypt, Greece, France, England, and the United States. The search for Flight 370 has involved up to 26 countries.

     Using an Atlas of the Bible and a World Atlas, I see this might be a good season to look for debris in the Mediterranean. According to the missionary travels of St. Paul, the safe sailing season, when the Mediterranean is free of storms, is from May 27 to September 14. The sea was rough during the first few days of the search, but the black box voice and flight data recorder finally was recovered on June 16. Thus far, although the recorder revealed smoke detectors went off in a toilet and under the cockpit just before the crash, whether fire was caused by a mechanical problem or a bomb is not known.

     The World Atlas showed the water where Flight MS804 went down is roughly 5,000 to 10,000 feet deep. It was dark when Flight 840 disappeared off radar around 2:30 am, and no eye witnesses in the normally busy eastern Mediterranean immediately came forward with information. Neither have any terrorists groups taken credit for downing the plane. The lack of a sighting may indicate navigation instruments were compromised by a smoldering fire rather than by the flash of a bomb.

     In the Indian Ocean west of Australia, where Flight 370 disappeared, the water is 20,000 or more feet deep. Currents off Australia move in a counterclockwise motion toward Africa, while the Mediterranean's currents flow south and easterly. Very little debris from Flight 370 has been found off east Africa's coast. and all searches for the missing plane were discontinued January 17, 2017. Flight MS804 was located in the Mediterranean east of the crash site and north of Alexandria, but no agreement about the cause of the crash has been reached.

Country Conversation Starters

Some students who go away to college wear the silhouettes of their home states on the front of their
T-shirts. It's a good way to meet and strike up a conversation with other students from the same area. When my daughter was young, I always tried to find shirts with sayings that could encourage adults to strike up a conversation with her so that she wouldn't be shy about interacting with people we knew. Wearing clothing with the silhouette of a country provides a similar opportunity to exchange a few words with others.

      What country might a child wear and how could a country silhouette be put on a shirt, skirt, pant, or cap?

     The country where a child lives, and the countries where the child and/or the child's parents/grandparents were born are obvious choices. Many schools have projects where students research and report on countries around the world. In kindergarten, my daughter wore a white shirt and red skirt and sang "Oh, Canada" in just such a production. She could have worn a map of Canada on her top or skirt. Encouraging children to think about countries they would like to visit could lead to another silhouette choice.

     Find a country map online and enlarge it to the size that would best fit a piece of clothing. You could cut out the country, trace around it on a shirt, etc, and color it in with puffy paints or markets that won't wash off. There's also the method of transferring an image used in the Middle Ages. The picture to be transferred was placed over a surface below, and an outline was made by piercing tiny holes around the picture. If a country map were placed over iron-on material used for patching clothes, pin holes could transfer an outline of the country to the material. Cut around the outline simply use an iron to press the country shape to any piece of clothing, and let the conversation begin.



   

1 Invention + 1 Invention = 1 New Invention

Combining two inventions to make a new one has solved a world of problems. Kids need outdoor exercise and water so a South African entrepreneur combined a merry-go-round and pump (See the earlier post, "Hope for the Future.").

     There are many reasons to invent a machine to solve the back-breaking problem of planting trees in the hot African sun. Drought-plagued countries, such as Ethiopia and Kenya, need to plant trees along river banks to prevent agricultural soil erosion. New trees also are needed to replace those harvested for firewood and charcoal and eaten by goats. And by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, trees reduce the greenhouse gases associated with climate change.

     The Equinox Community Farm in Wisconsin, USA, has come up with a "water wheel transplanter" it uses to save time and the back breaking work of planting onion seedlings in straight rows. A tractor drags a sort of flatbed trailer that has three large wheels lined with hollow spikes that dig and water holes to ready them for two men who ride on the flatbed and plant pre-grown seedlings. by two men seated on the flatbed. Two 80-gallon tanks leak water out of the spiked wheels that make Could this system be modified to simplify the process of planting trees? After the trees are planted, another pass over the field might put the plastic cones that conserve water over each new tree.

     Obviously this is just one idea for creating an invention that can plant the trees Africa needs. There are a wide variety of organizations, government agencies, and companies already looking for solutions: the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100); World Resources Institute (WRI); government Ministries of Agriculture, Environment, Forest, and Climate Change; Farmers Managed Natural Regeneration; Kenya-based Komaza; the Unique Forestry and Land Use consulting firm; Moringa Partnership.

(Incidentally, by purchasing cards at arborday.org/giveatree, you can plant trees in America's National Forests in honor of family and friends.)
   

Invest in Africa's Agricultural Future

Following the Battle of Waterloo, although Napoleon had been defeated, Baron Rothschild of the 18th century British banking family is said to have observed that the most profit can be made when there is no consensus about the future. His actual quote is believed to have been, "Buy when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own." A potential Disney investor might have said the less gruesome, "Buy when Mickey is still a steamboat captain." When I lived in Hawaii, I often heard the quote, "Missionaries came to do good, and they did very well (financially)."

     The point is, now is the time to get in on Africa's future, especially the continent's agricultural potential. It takes time to develop a profitable African connection, and time is on the side of today's young people who have 40 or more years of work ahead of them. One option to explore is the process of putting together a supply chain that buys and brings processed African produce to markets in developed countries. Another is to process, brand, package and bring African products, such as Go Honey, to the growing African market.

     Shoppers in Madison, Wisconsin, now buy cassava flour from West Africa at the African & American Store on East Johnson Street. Thanks to Hugh Jackman of Wolverine and musical theatre fame, New Yorkers now drink his Laughing Man Ethiopian coffee at two cafes he opened in Manhattan. A film, "Dukale's Dream," which can be rented at tugg.com/titles/dukales-dream, tells the six-year story of how Jackman and Dukale met and how Dukale's family has prospered. The family that used to spend the day growing coffee and collecting firewood now has a gas system that provides light and a cooking flame. Dukale increased coffee production by buying more land, hiring workers, and training other farmers. His wife owns a small shop and his children attend school.

     As a growing continent which now has more than 1 billion mouths to feed, Africa also provides a healthy opportunity for future agricultural sales and profits. The roads and rails China built to move minerals and lumber to ports for export have improved infrastructure for distribution within Africa as well. Countries, such as Nigeria, that have seen falling oil and mineral export prices damage their economies, have been forced to rediscover their agricultural pasts and improve their farm to market road systems.

     Director Chris Isaac at the venture capital company, Agdevco, cautions that it can take a 10 to 20 year view to overcome barriers to big returns from African agriculture. He cites competing claims on land that make it difficult to lease or buy. Then, there are poorly educated farmers, poor quality seed and fertilizer, limited access to credit, a lack of infrastructure, an undeveloped marketing network, and a corrupt bureaucracy, especially at the local level. These barriers obviously also impede the progress of women who make up half of Africa's poor farmers. (Also see the earlier post, "Want An Exciting Career?")

     What's going on in Uganda suggests the kind of advantageous landscape agricultural investors should seek. Once in the grip of Joseph Kony's Lord Resistance Army (LRA), Uganda is on track to become a rice and maize success story. Millions of dollars of investment have come to the area north of Kampala from international private equity, global venture capital, and private companies, such as German-based Amatheon Agri. What these investors provide are land, high quality seed and fertilizer, leased machinery, training, a market for farmers' output, a grain processing facility, and an integrated value chain for selling grain nationally. Uganda's government has invested in roads and power and has given tax breaks to foreign investors.

     With $25, anyone can invest in Africa's agricultural future by going to kiva.org.