Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Teaching Math and Science to Early Learners  Michael Harryman  9/28/13 UP925  cc >> This panel was actually put together by Wisconsin Public Television. Of course, you think about Sesame Street and early learners, and of course Wisconsin Public Television has certainly been a leader in that. I'm going to introduce Michael Harryman, who is the director of marketing and communications for Wisconsin Public Television. He was the one who put together this panel and is going to be moderating it for us. Michael. [APPLAUSE] >> All right, thank you, everybody. Thank you, Julie. And I also want to thank the Wisconsin Science Festival for hosting this panel today. Good afternoon and welcome to the beautiful Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery and to the Wisconsin Science Festival and to this presentation today where we're going to take you on a little journey into the mind of a preschooler. And no, I'm not talking about your spouse. 

This is something that we have been thinking about in Public Television land and in the world of education, both of those sort of in parallel, for a long time. There's an awful lot of crossover, as Julie referenced, and we're going to get into some of that in just a little bit. I've got a couple of other housekeeping issues before we start. First of all, if you'll notice behind you and around you we have cameras rolling here today. We are actually live streaming this event right now at WPT.org and at WiscSciFest.org. So that's being live streamed currently. It is also being archived for a later broadcast as part of University Place, which is an amazing collection of video broadcasts of lecturers and presenters on topics as diverse as the mind can go and from folks from all over the world, a lot of them captured right here at the University of Wisconsin. And you can see that during the day on Wisconsin Public Television. Soon to be in the evenings during prime time on our Create channel, our Wisconsin Channel, I'm sorry, and any time at WPT.org. You're going to know that email address by the end of the day. 

And the second piece of housekeeping, you guys all have these little things, little smartphones, cell phones. Take them out, one of the things I want to, it's different than you think I'm going, make them quiet. Make them be quiet. That would be awesome if you could that, but use them today. Tweet and post on your Facebook page, email friends while you're sitting here and let them know they can watch this right now at WPT.org. See, the email address again, or the web address. I'm going to keep saying it. But please do use them. Just be courteous to the folks around you. And an apology right up front. 

I'm going to be referring to some notes today. This is a really complicated series of subjects that we have strung together into this journey, and I don't want to mess anything up so I'm going to be looking down every once and a while. There is this intentional and undeniable connection between public television programming and the world of education. And, in a nutshell, that idea is sort of this concept of exploration, of getting to know the world around you, being able to process the world around you, getting along with other people, and because of that it felt like who better to bring together a panel that really marries these two things more formally here today on stage for you. There's been a truckload of research done going back generations on the power of public media and its ability to help young kids develop both academically and just  developmentally/socially. And now there's more research that shows that kids at very, very young ages can learn and retain and apply really complex learning. Things that we maybe historically would have considered really complex learning. And that includes the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math, or the STEM areas, and that's one of the reasons that we're up here today. We keep hearing about how behind America is in the world of education. We used to be leaders, now we're way behind everybody else, particularly in areas that involve technology, engineering, math, science. 

We're not graduating enough mathematicians and scientists. We aren't getting to the kids early enough. You guys hear that all the time, right? We're not getting to the kids early enough. Well, how early is too early? That's one of the questions we're going to talk about today. Can you teach a three-year-old math or engineering concepts? And if you can, should you? Is it appropriate? Is it ethical? What's the best approach? What are some of the tools and the resources that are out there that you can use free of charge? Things that are just out in the cloud. Keep in mind that these kids haven't gone to school yet. So that also brings into question the role of us as adults, parents, influencers. This is before formal education begins, so in many respects we're talking about informal education as a way of sort of leading into formal education. So there's a lot of questions, and hopefully today we'll get a few answers. One of the questions, of course, is what do the experts say? Early on I referred to myself as a host today. 

That's all I am. I'm actually not a panelist. I'm with Public Television. That's great, but these guys over here to my left are the experts. I'm going to do a quick introduction, and as I bring each of them up, I'm going to give you a little bit more background on them. Dr. Edward Hubbard, right over here to my left, is a neuroscientist and assistant professor from the UW School of Education and the Waisman Center. To the left of him, Dr. Anita Wager, who is an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at UW Madison School of Education. To her left, Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, who's the senior vice president of curriculum and content for education, research, and outreach at Sesame Workshop out in New York. And, to her left, Ms. Rachel Connolly, who's the director of education with NOVA with WGBH in Boston. I always say I hate being the smartest guy in the room, and today there is literally no danger of that. 

[LAUGHTER] We're in great company. Though we all agree a lecture is really boring and kind of, well, old school, what we've created for you today is actually sort of a hybridized lecture, and there's a reason for that. What I mean by that, first of all, is each of our four guests are going to present, sort of telling the arc of a story here. And with all good stories, you start at the beginning, and that's where we're going to be starting today. We designed it this way for two reasons. The first reason, it's a complicated subject. There are a lot of moving parts to it, so we wanted to make sure we have a foundation before we really start moving through it. Secondarily, learning is cumulative, and so we need to put those building blocks in place and sort of move through this, which is a subtext of today's panel, and it's also a great reason for me to introduce this first presenter today. Dr. Edward M Hubbard is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology which is part of the School of Education here at the University of Wisconsin Madison where he directs the educational neuroscience lab. His initial training was at the University of Cal-Berkeley in cognitive science and the University of California in San Diego where he received a dual PhD in experimental psychology and cognitive science. 

His research uses brain imaging tools, including functional MRI, to explore the neuro basis of numerical and mathematical abilities, synesthesia, and multisensory integration in adults and children. He is the author of more than 20 publications in top scientific journals. He is the co-editor, along with Julie Simner, of the mammoth 1,000-page Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia, which is coming out later this year. In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Hubbard is teaching one of the only undergraduate courses in the country that actually link brain development and education, and it's titled Mind, Brain, and Education. Ladies and gentlemen, Ed Hubbard. [APPLAUSE] >> So, as Michael mentioned, I am the director of this educational neuroscience lab. We're really interested in trying to make these links between what we know about brain system, what we know about development, and what we know about education. And some of the questions we're exploring are, for example, what are the cognitive systems and the brain systems that are placed early in development that education then builds on? And that's part of what I'll talk about today. And then, how are those brain system modified by education? And then finally, how might individual differences in those brain systems predict later academic achievement? And today I'm primarily going to focus on these some of these very early sorts of stages thinking about the abilities that are present even in infants that give rise to the skills that we talk about at school entry and really how differences in those systems and in the environment might lead to differences in children's school readiness and then sort of the outcomes afterward. And I want to start out by showing you guys a video from Liz Brannon's lab at Duke University. 

So, what you're going to see here is this little guy is staring at the center of the screen because there's this cool, colorful pinwheel. And then on the left side of the screen, there will be sets of dots, and there will be eight dots and 16 dots and eight dots and 16 dots, and they alternate. On the right side of the screen, it's just eight dots, eight dots, eight dots. And what I want you to do is watch his eyes. Watch what happens as he starts to watch this. So he's staring now at the pinwheel, and you've got eight dots, 16 dots. And he's kind of checking them both out. [LAUGHTER] He's looking around. And you can see critically the position of the dots changes. The size of the dots changes. 

The density of the display changes. So it's not as if the infant is just saying, oh, look, this is kind of fun because it's changing. He's really, in some sense, responding to the change in number here. About now he's going to double check on the other side. Yep, still boring. [LAUGHTER] He goes right back to the side where it's changing. [LAUGHTER]  So the critical thing is this infant, he's six months old, he can discriminate 16 dots from eight dots. So he has the ability to reliably tell those apart. But if you do the same thing with, say, 12 dots and eight dots, he can't do it. When he gets to be nine months old, he will be able to do that. 

So we have this approximate number sense. This ability to, just like we can see colors, we can see quantities in the environment, and as we pick up on that, we can use that information. And it's not just human infants that can do this. So here's a monkey, and this monkey is playing this game. So a number of dots go behind the blue screen. Sometimes more dots are added. So, one plus one. And the monkey just has to click to get the appropriate answer here. So, 10 plus two. And you can see he's good. 

He's really good. And he does it pretty quickly. And every time he gets it right, he gets a little peanut. So you see him chewing away there. Pretty happy monkey.  I don't think the video shows him getting any wrong, but I think the point is really clear here. The reason that I want to show you guys this is because it suggests that humans come into this world with certain cognitive abilities, this ability to really make sense of quantity, and we share that ability even with nonhuman primates. In fact, there are studies that suggest that even bumblebees can do certain things with numbers. Ants apparently count their steps as they're wondering around in the Sahara Desert. So the ability to do something about number, to know when you're outnumbered, to know when there's more food, seems to be this really sort of basic, primitive thing. 

And we can look at the brain systems that are involved for that. And what we see is this really striking correspondence. So, what you guys are seeing here is a set of different brain images from all sorts of different studies, and in all these cases you're seeing the left side of the brain. So the front of the brain is here, the back of the brain here, top and bottom of the brain sort of where you'd expect them to be. And when we look in monkey brains, we can see that there are neurons, individual nerve cells in these brain regions, in parietal cortex up here and in prefrontal cortex here, that respond to numbers. Again, these are sets of dots. So sort of quantities. In a three-month-old infant, you play, say, eight dots, eight dots, eight dots, eight dots. The infant gets bored. Then you show 16 dots. 

The infant looks more, but we can also, with brain imaging technology, see what are the brain regions that respond more strongly when you go, say, from eight dots to 16 dots. And you can see, again, it's these parietal and frontal regions that you see in the monkey. In adults doing subtraction, these regions here, it's the same sort of thing. So we see this left hemisphere regions of parietal and frontal cortex. Even adults at NIH when they were asked to do integral calculus recruited this system in parietal and frontal cortex. So we see this amazing sort of continuity. And this is data from a study that we did in our lab asking this question: in early school years, kindergarten through third grade, what happens as children start to make the link between knowing this many dots and knowing that this squiggly line stands for those? So making that translation between quantity and symbols, which is really the first step in getting to be good at all these other things that we're talking about. I give you guys one more example of how important this approximate number system is. So this is time for a little audience participation. I'm going to show you guys a gray screen, and on that screen there will be some yellow dots and some blue dots. 

And I'm going to flash this up there for like half a second, so you won't have time to count. Don't even try. And I just want you to tell me are there more yellow dots or more blue dots. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Yellow. And we can actually go back and count, and you can see that there are four, six, eight yellow dots, and two, four, six blue dots. So there are indeed more yellow dots than blue dots. And then we can look and sort of make this easier or harder. So I could have shown you, say, 20 yellow dots and two blue dots, and that would be really easy. Or I could have shown you nine dots that were yellow and 10 dots that were blue. That would have been much harder. 

And we can basically find where are people able to reliably do this. This is in 14-year-old children. And what they showed is that a small number is good. So you can discriminate, say, nine from 10. That would be .1. On the other hand, if you needed, say, 12 versus eight, that would be .5. And so you can see that some children do this really well, some children are not as sensitive to it. But critically, when you do just a pencil and paper test of math abilities, this is a standardized nationally norm test, you can see that those children who are better able to do that dot thing also perform better on a pencil and paper test of math. And this is work that Justin Halberda and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins did. And so the question becomes, what's going on with this approximate number system? And you can see the same sort of thing in children, for example, who struggled to learn math, I won't go into the details on this, and you can also see that parietal cortex, the same region, is less recruited in these children. 

So this is sort of the math version of dyslexia: dyscalculia. And these are kids who are struggling to do even simple things, like say whether seven is more or less than five. But critically what's really happening here is that core system, that approximate number system, is just the beginning. It's the things that a six-month-old infant has. It's the thing that a nonhuman primate has. But as we go through preschool, as we go through early education, we start to link this system with all sorts of other things. So we think about counting on our fingers and knowing number words. So in English this year is 2013 or four. Spanish, ocho. French, quatre-vingt-sept, so that's 87 in French. 

Learning these number symbols. And then also learning to link these up with spatial representations. So in games like Chutes and Ladders, we're always making a connection between a spatial location and a number, and as we move through the game, we move a certain number of spaces, a certain number of numbers. That link between numbers and space turns out to be a critical sort of skill that has been explored now for 20 years in the education and cognitive neuroscience world to really understand how is it that children start to build up and use those sorts of experiences. And that's kind of where I want to leave you guys is here's this system but educational experiences build on all of that to eventually create all the sorts of things that we're talking about. So, with that, it's sort of a perfect spot to lead into everybody else's work talking about these educational experiences, but I wanted to give you that sense of the neural systems and how they might get retrained by education. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] >> All right. Anita, do you want to come on up and we'll get your PowerPoint up here while I introduce you. Well, anybody have any doubts on the can we thing? I think I don't have any doubts about that. 

And by the way, there is going to be time for some questions and answers and audience involvement in all of this stuff at the end of this session, so stick around and write down your questions or remember them because we'd love to be able to have an opportunity to answer them later. So Dr. Anita Wager is an assistant professor in curriculum and instruction with the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Her research focuses on broadening notions of teaching mathematics for understanding to incorporate the cultural and sociopolitical context in which children live and learn. She's particularly interested in professional development that supports early childhood teachers as they draw on the rich mathematical resources from young children's homes and communities to develop equitable mathematics pedagogy. Dr. Wager is currently principal investigator on an NSF funded research project, professional development for culturally relevant teaching and learning in pre-K mathematics. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Anita Wager. [APPLAUSE] >> Good afternoon. There is nothing like knowing that you're going to have to go between this really cool new work in brain research and Elmo. [LAUGHTER] But I'm going to give it a go. My primary topic today is really, the three things I want to talk about is we've now heard from Dr. Hubbard that yes, kids can do math in early age, but why should they? And then I really want to talk about also, like how they should, which is all about play. 

So, what is the big deal about math with young children? There's been a lot in the papers. There's a lot in the kinds of paper I read more and more about doing mathematics with young children. And there's a lot of research that's really starting to point out that kids who engage in rich early math experiences when they're young actually do better in all content areas as they get older. And this is research with children and preschool and kindergarten, and then they look at their scores in third, fourth, and fifth grade and see that this really builds up, and even more so than literacy, which I find very interesting because historically literacy has been such an important part. That's kind of what people think we need to do with our young kids is read to them all the time, and math has been getting left out. The other interesting part is there's a very recent study that has also shown that students from historically marginalized backgrounds who have rich math experiences, their scores on standardized tests are the same as kids from, their sort of more resourced peers. So I'm talking about the achievement gap here, and young children who may have had a gap in their test scores when they got older, we're not seeing that gap if they have rich math experiences when they're young. There's also research on, whoops, I missed one of them here. There's also a lot of research about really specific activities that can help kids do better in math. These include, and Ed mentioned one of them, board games. 

There's a lot work, even simple linear board games really help kids learn to count. So things like Chutes and Ladders, but even more simple than that. There's also research that shows that parents and families who do a lot of number talk with their children, especially number talk up to the number 10, their children are better at cardinality. Cardinality is where you know how many in a set. So if you count one, two, three, four, then you ask the child how many and they can say four. They're much better at doing that if their parents have talked a lot about just using numbers with them in every day activities, especially if they actually have materials that they're doing this with. So they're counting different things, different family members, different chairs, whatever it's going to be. So we know we're getting more and more research that math at early age is really important, but that doesn't mean that everybody needs to run out and buy flashcards and games and things that they have to do with their kids all the time, those little workbooks that you see at the checkout stand, because play is so important that we don't want to constantly be taking our kids and plopping them down when they're really young and having them work through these more structured activities. So the idea is really, and I'm going to kind of talk a bit about how we can link the ideas of math and play. Now, some of the really important aspects are play. 

There's a lot of research in early childhood for years that have shown that play supports socioemotional development. And children who have had rich experiences in play are less likely to have behavioral issues as they get older because they've already sort of figured out how to negotiate between the kids that they're playing with. And it also has shown that play really supports academic skills. One of my favorite scholars, Fleer, really talks about play and imagination as this place in between play and learning. So, it's the children's imagination that is helping kids to make that link. And I like thinking about putting that together with the work that Ed does, and what's happening in your brain but also what's happening socially as children interact with each other. So, I'm telling you they've got to get a lot of math experiences, but I'm also telling you that they should really have a lot of experience with play. So how do we do this math and play, and why do we do this math and play? Part of it, it's not easy to do math and play. It's hard for adults to notice and mathematize child-initiated play. Some of the preschool teachers that I work with I know are out here, and we've talked about this before. 

It's hard to see it, and it's hard to know what to do, and it's really hard when kids are playing to interrupt the play without messing up the play and having them stop because any of you who have worked with young children, if they're doing something and you say something like, so how many plates did you put out at the table for the bears? They're like, the bears are blue. [LAUGHTER] They go on to whatever. They don't want to answer your question. So it's hard to kind of work the math in. As a result, this kind of structured math, and adult-initiated math, that is really working its way into the public discourse and into a lot of policy, and the common core right now is set up starting at kindergarten. There's a lot of talk about what's supposed to happen in preschool so kids are ready to go to kindergarten. And so the work that I do with my colleagues here is really to think about how we balance this idea of math and play. So, I kind of think of it as pouring the math into the play that kids are engaged with. And there's three ways that I've talked about it with the teachers I work with that also really applicable at home. And it isn't like anything amazing that I would suggest that you need to plan and prepare and respond, but if you think about how that can happen in a classroom or in the home. 

Starting with planning, and this is really, we started work with teachers but in talking with my teachers I think about how it can happen at home. So, daily routines at school might be just counting up the children who are having lunch or having a particular meal. At home this can be, I don't know, counting the forks if you're setting the table, and I'm going to come back to that idea later, the idea of setting the table. Transitions at school might be when you're standing outside the water fountain looking at the different shapes that you can see in the hall and just pointing to them. And then some explicit activities might be more something that you've really got planned that you want to do with your children. It home it might be playing a game. So the next part is preparing the environment, which I call seeding, and I think of this as like sprinkling the math fairy dust around. And it's so that kids can stumble into math when they're doing the things that they like to do. Some of that might be games. Sometimes they're just manipulatives, and I'm not saying to go out and buy fancy manipulatives to use in your home. 

I'm talking about just, kids count everything. They're happy to count and play with things. And then also different interest areas. So we're going to get to the importance of popular culture and popular media pretty soon when we start talking about Rosemarie, but that's a place where kids really start to engage is they take sometimes what they see on TV and then they bring that into their play and as they do that, there's a lot of math that goes on with it. I don't know, how many cookies are they giving to the Cookie Monster or something. Then responding is the last part, and that's really mathematizing the play and it's the hardest part. It's about knowing where children are, what their understanding of the math is, and it's asking questions in ways that push their thinking a little but also doesn't stop the play that happens, but then making suggestions too. So if they're passing out cookies to their teddy bears or something that they have sitting out, asking the question: what if we get this other animal and he joins, do we need another cookie? So, the main point I want to leave you with is that you can't buy the math, you need to find it in what you do. And everybody engages in math every day in their every day activities, and I said before one thing you could think about is having your children count the silverware when you're setting the table. Well, not everybody sets the table, not everybody uses silverware. 

So you need to think about the things you do in your own home every day that already involve math, and then include the kids in it. Counting is the easiest one. How many steps out to the bus stop, or how many of anything that you're dishing out. Counting things if you're cooking if somebody's helping you prepare food. But there's also shapes all over the place. Understanding spatial sense is really important for kids so having them try and put these shapes together. And, with that, I'm going to turn it over to Rosemarie, and the fun part is how kids can see how you connect this with what kids do in the activities that they really care about participating in. [APPLAUSE]  >> Okay, so the answer to the second part of this riddle, so now we know kids can learn, we know that we should teach them this stuff, which is an excellent transition over to our friends from Sesame Workshop and Dr. Rosemarie Truglio standing next to me. She's the senior vice president of curriculum and content for education, research, and outreach at Sesame Workshop. That one I have to read. 

It's a lot of words for a pretty big job. She's responsible for the development of the interdisciplinary curriculum on which Sesame Street is based, and she oversees content development for all Sesame co-productions globally. Additionally, she reviews all content on Sesame Street platforms and has overseen all of the educational research related to program development since 1997. She currently serves in the PBS Kids Next Generation Media Advisory Board and has served on numerous other prestigious boards, including the National Association for Media Literacy Foundation. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Rosemarie Truglio. [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you so much. This is a great lead in. I've never been on a panel where the flow has been such a great flow. I gave a lot of thought to this title because people think of Sesame Street and they think of really young children, but when you really watch Sesame Street you know that there is content not only for young children but for the adults in their lives, and we take that very seriously. We want to create content across media platforms that bring the adult into the activity. 

So that's why I'm saying let's investigate together. I think one of the reasons why we tell parents to not get involved with their children's science or math education, I'm thinking about Michael and his child who went to Montessori, and he said, how can I be more involved in my child's learning, and the teacher said stay out of it. And the reason why the teacher said stay out of it is because the adults often mess it up. They mess it up because they're not facilitating. They're taking over the play. They're structuring the play. They're not taking cues from the child and letting the child engage in that self-guided play. What I'm going to be asking you to do, especially when you use our content, is to take our content and investigate together as we're exploring science, STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math activities. So, who are we? There's a lot of confusion. Sesame Workshop is the creator of Sesame Street. 

We are a nonprofit educational organization making a meaningful difference in the lives of children worldwide, we're a global company, by addressing the critical needs of children. And we do this by creating engaging media content so that children can reach their highest potential. My job is to always keep in mind what are the critical needs of preschool children. I just want to remind the audience, Sesame Street is based on a whole child curriculum starting at the age of two. So I know that a lot of nine-month-olds like to watch our show. As parents and educators, please not expose Sesame to nine-month-olds because they're not really learning a lot, and, as the neuroscientists could tell us, they need to develop a little bit more before they can really have an understanding of the complex content. So when I was learning all about our crisis here in the United States, that we are falling behind in science and math, my job is can we actually create a curriculum for preschool children so that Sesame is setting the foundation for these early skills. So we started, makes sense, we started with a science and nature curriculum. Children like to go out and explore the environment, and it was a way for us to give some messages about how we could be better stewards of our planet. And when I brought the advisors in and I said, well, look at all this great content we created, and they said, yeah, you did a great job with scientific exploration but you were a little weak on scientific investigation. 

So we explored that a little more and we decided that, yes, our characters and storylines should focus on very specific questions. So Elmo is learning the word hypothesis, and he actually gets to say it. But, more importantly, not only say it but actually understand what it means to make a hypothesis. So they were posing lots of questions around on Sesame Street and investigating and collecting the data to find out the answers. So then when the challenge came to create a STEM curriculum, I decided, you know what, we should have an integrated STEM curriculum because children's brains are integrated. They're not siloed. They don't learn literacy with one part of their brain and math with another part of the brain. And we also know that these disciplines work in a very interdisciplinary way. Mathematicians draw upon science, science draws upon mathematicians, and of course engineering and technology is all in the mix. So I decided that one way we can integrate these siloed disciplines is to weave content around what I'm calling scientific increase skills. 

So observing, investigating, analyzing and reporting and reflecting on that big idea. And we had a great time with this. In fact, we enlisted Super Grover. And there's a special format. If you've not watched Sesame Street in a while, we've changed the format in season 40. And by the way, we just debuted our 44th season last Monday with new programming. So we're very much alive and well. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. But when the writer staff came after a brainstorming session and said, okay, we're going to take that STEM curriculum and we're going to create a special format for Super Grover, I have to say I got a little nervous. I said, oh, my goodness, I love Super Grover, I think he's definitely one of my favorite characters, but I don't know if I want him to be the poster child for STEM education because even though he tries hard, he's not the best of learners. 

[LAUGHTER] And my STEM advisors said, oh, my goodness, no, he's the perfect poster child because it is about trial and error. It is about persistence. It is about experiencing, posing the questions, trying to answer, but finding out what you're learning through the process and then putting it all together, and that's what he does in that format. We also enlisted Murray, who is our character who is out on the street, not to be confused with Elmo. When we are out in the street, people are saying Elmo, Elmo, and he keeps saying, no, Murray, Murray. But Murray plays a very important role. His role is at the beginning of the show he introduces us to a vocabulary word, and we're introducing children to, as you could see, quite a few STEM vocabulary words which also integrate the arts because we eventually evolved STEM into STEAM by bringing the arts into the equation. But also on the street, he and his friend Ovejita, who's a little lamb who only speaks Spanish, they are asking lots of science experiments. So they're actually doing science experiments on the streets of New York. So here are some of the words. 

As you can see, we're not talking down to children at all, and through our research we are learning that children are learning these words. They are able. I'm talking about three- and four-year-olds able to articulate the meaningfulness of these words. I'm going to be giving you an example of an episode that has already aired called Best House of the Year. This was one of our STEAM shows. We took the story of the three little pigs, a very familiar story with children, and turned it into a STEM discussion. So they're all excited. They have their brand new house made out of bricks, as you can see, and they are going to be featured as the best house of the year, but the big bad wolf has been working out and his huffing and puffing is getting even more strong. And so, even though the house is made of bricks, he's able to blow the house down. So now we're actually starting to learn about materials. 

The properties of matter. What kinds of materials can their new house be made out of so that the big bad wolf doesn't demolish the house because they need to get a picture to be featured as the best house of the year. And they go through lots of trials and tribulations because the big bad wolf has been working out. And Elmo is, every time he blows, Elmo's on his roller skates. So the house gets knocked down, but Elmo gets blown away. Here's an example of a child Elmo thinking out of the box and saying, okay, we've picked some really strong materials, we started with brick and then we went to stone and then we went to metal, but it keeps getting knocked down. How about we put the brick house, let's go back to the first idea, the brick house, we'll put it on wheels because the house will then move but won't fall down. And that's how we get the word innovation, and of course that's what happens: the house moves but it doesn't fall down. So that is one of the episodes that we're featuring on our new STEM hub, and that's one of the reasons why I'm here today to promote this amazing digital platform. Through the funding of CA Technologies, the Bechtel foundation and Heising-Simons, we took all of this science content that we created, both our linear stories, our games, both desktop and mobile games, but then we added the activities. 

Activities for teachers to use in the classroom and activities for parents to use at the home. We want to make these activities very simple. We want to bring the adults into the situation so that they are becoming playful, and they could be facilitating very young children's learning. Everything that we suggest in these activities are around household objects, very easy objects. And, as you can see, Abby and Elmo are holding paper towel holders, and those paper towel holders are then integrated in many of the activities. So I encourage you to go to SesameStreet.org/STEM and learn from these activities and use these activities. So here is a brief clip of what we're calling a highlight reel for the STEM hub. >> Are you ready to observe? >> Binoculars up. >> Binoculars down. >> Are you ready to investigate? >> What does investigate mean? >> To find out more about something. 

>> Are you ready to experiment? >> Nice experiment, Elmo. Can they put me down now? >> Then you're ready for Sesame Street Little Discoverers. Big fun with science, math, and more. >> Okay. >> Yeah, let's do it! >> Featuring the engaging and loveable Sesame Street Muppets. >> Oh look, it's the three pigs. § We're gonna build § § A new house § § A brand new -- house § § It won't take any longer § § And its gonna § § Be much stronger § >> This all new digital destination helps children and the adults in their lives explore STEM concepts in everyday moments. >> The who of what now? >> STEM. Science, technology, engineering, and math. >> Right, what she said. 

>> Through interactive games, videos, and hands-on activities, Sesame Street Little Discoverers encourages children to explore and investigate the world around them. >> What could you engineer? >> Little Discoverers also provides hands-on classroom ideas for educators and activities for parents and children to do together at home. >> Hey, it's all in the name of science, Alan. >> Huh? >> And Little Discoverers also features six new mobile games for kids and parents on the go. >> Come on, let's investigate together. >> Check out Little Discoverers. Big fun with science, math, and more at SesameStreet.org/STEM.  >> So, as you can see, from these six topics, we're not watering it down at all, experiments, sink and float. And just to put a plug about technology, technology enables us to do things that hands-on activities sometimes can't. An example of this mobile game, when we're doing sinking and floating, we're starting in the middle of the water because Super Grover is going to be swimming in the water with an object, and then the child has to make a prediction: is it going to go to the surface of the water or is it going to go down to the floor of the water? And when children are doing sinking and floating, they're always starting at the surface to the water, so it brings another perspective in that you can't do without technology unless you're going to be scuba divers yourself. 

So, force and motion, properties of matter, some really interesting topics here. With the Best House of the Year, there are these hands-on activities where children are going to be able to make bridges out of paper to figure out what design is the strongest design, and I'm not going to give you the answer. And then there's some interesting interactive games where we have to build a house. So we have to build a house for a play date for Big Bird and Snuffleupagus. Big Bird is very tall; Snuffy is very wide. So how do you engineer this house so you're making sure that both of them will fit in the house at the same time? And with the engineer track building, you have to get from point A to point B, but there's lots of different obstacles along the way, so you have to position the tracks. It's a nice spatial relations kind of activity. This is not on the digital hub, but it's another body of work that we've done with the national park services that we also debuted this June. And there's some wonderful activities for parents and teachers to engage in as you're outside, not only exploring the national parks but exploring your local parks and your backyard. So that would be /parks. 

What we've learned is don't be afraid to expose preschoolers to big science concepts because they are learning and they're learning lots. But when you are working with young children, it has to be visualized. You just can't talk about it. You have to show it, which is the role of media to actually show things. It has to be explained, and it has to be repeated. STEM activities need to be relevant, and I put the word intuitive because when you're putting children in front of a mobile device, they don't want to listen to instructions. Even though I put lots of instructions in our mobile games, they interrupt those instructions. They want to be able to get to the game immediately. So you've got to keep that in mind to design it so that it is very intuitive, and it's got to be engaging so that they are repeating this information. And we know there's a huge need, so what our role is to provide these very concrete, very easy, every day moment engaging activities for you to share with children but most importantly adults. 

And that's a nice segue to Rachel who does focus on providing content for the adults. [APPLAUSE]  >> You got it? You'll drive. Okay, let her drive. I can't drive and do this at the same time. That's dangerous. It's like texting and driving. All right, so we've come a long way in this little journey of ours so far. We have figured out an awful lot of the answers to the questions that we posed earlier, and we're done, right? Because kids can learn and we're good? But now there is that role of the parent. And Rosemarie kind of referenced it earlier. I referenced earlier that we're talking about kids that haven't gone into a formal learning environment yet. 

So the role of the parent or the caregiver is sort of this transitional role in a way. But it also starts to bring into focus concepts like lifelong learning and where does that quest begin? Is it something that you instill in kids when they're younger? What about the adult as the role  model? Is it healthy to watch your parents learning things and being inquisitive? Does exploration ever end? And that's where our next guest from NOVA is coming from. So Rachel Connolly is NOVA's director of education, and she considers it her mission in life to find new ways to make complex concepts accessible. By the way, that's just one of the reasons that she's here today. Before joining team NOVA, Rachel served as the director of the planetarium at the University of Louisville, as the astrophysics education manager at the American Museum of Natural History, and as a high school physics teacher in New York City. So she's played front line in a number of different environments related to education, both formal and informal. She studied physics and astronomy at Denison University, and she's currently working to complete her PhD in science education at Columbia. Previous life experiences, which I'm by the way including in this intro because I think you'll get a sense of sort of the breadth of informal education and what it can look, she was actually the webmaster for the band Boston and has consulted on an educational project for the Queen of Jordan. So, with that, Rachel Connolly from NOVA. [APPLAUSE] >> Thanks for that. 

That's where Facebook comes back to haunt you. [LAUGHTER] Thank you. I really appreciate being here. I know sort of the question as why NOVA is here on a preschool panel. I'd like to really sort of bring this back to this sort of parent larger lifelong learning aspect of which, obviously, all preschoolers are embedded in in their lives with their parents and their families in general. It was very nice to be able to coordinate a little with Rosemarie before this panel because the great story about the greatest house, or, I'm sorry, the best house? >> Best house. >> Best house, yeah. I'm going to sort of take that theme of material science and sort of show you it plays out. The importance of narrative is really central here. Of course, the first thing that anyone in media production and television, what's the story? And we really look in education and lifelong learning, which is sort of where NOVA is situated, NOVA education and my role, is to figure out how we take that narrative beyond broadcast for other really important lifelong learning experiences that will be great for parents as well as parents and children together. 

So I'd love to share with you some of those strategies and ways we do that at NOVA, but along the way show you how the narratives, some of these material science narratives play out in various different strategies and ways that we develop. So, just to give you sort of a sense of the breadth of what I'm going to be talking about, NOVA is entering, or is in currently, it's 40th season, and I'm sure many of you have heard of it, if not seen it, in your lives. But the broadcast itself, we also have a very rich website where you can watch videos, shorts, interactives, and there's a lot of new content and things that live solely on the website itself. So there's a way to go from the seeing to the deeper exploration on the website. NOVA Education is a site particularly for educators and teachers where the sort of short video clips have been extracted, particularly for teaching purposes with an eye to, being a classroom teacher I used to have my, I'm dating myself now, but the VHS tapes cued up to this is a good little clip because you often can't show an entire 50-minute show, but you have something you want to show them out of it. So we pull those clips with a lens to what the next generation science standards and that are so that those concepts, those little nuggets that are really good for teachers. And that is what you can find on the NOVA Education site. NOVA Labs is another, I'm going to delve into this more deeply, but a newer web platform, similar to the one that Rosemarie talked about for Sesame Street. This is where we sort of bring content into these sort of more teen focused and hands-on, getting right into the research where you can go from seeing to learning more on this to doing actual science and citizen science. And then, finally, Science Cafes because the importance of dialog and local community and gathering, such as what we're doing right now at the Wisconsin Science Festival, around particular community and finding and understanding who is in your community. 

Doing some of the very types of research that you see in the show is what the Science Cafes enable. So, I'm going to go through this really quickly. Just so you know, there's sort of a field behind this that we work with, and that field is one of informal education which has an entire spectrum. It's not just one thing is informal science education. There is an entire spectrum, and that is a spectrum of engagement. And that is that we can start with what we call public understanding of science, which is often where broadcasts and programs are, just to make sure people understand and communicate the big picture and the topics and the narrative form, but then how we bring that along the continuum into actual engagement so that it goes into the home and the play and the conversation and the things that you've heard the panel here already talk about. Those are the strategies we're working to develop. So we're going to walk through the spectrum and show you how we go about doing that. The narratives I'm going to work with is one of making stuff, which sounds a lot like the three little pigs building their house out of different materials. It's a question of how do we tell a story of material science to adults in a way that is more bringing them along, more narrative, and more approachable, one of what innovation looks like. 

So Making Stuff, the first series, aired about a year and a half ago with the host David Pogue. And it had four episodes around four major themes. Themes that sort of connected people's every day lives and were approachable. The first season was cleaner, stronger, smaller, and faster. And the, oh, excuse me, faster is this season. There's always one. I always get one. So the new season that we're entering in, this will be airing beginning in October, October 16th, so we're going to get a little sneak peek here, is the wilder, colder, faster, and safer. So these are topics that lead us into real world issues of faster, and not just in terms of speed but processes in you every day life and procedures and what the concept of faster really can look like. Colder, safer is very applicable to things like building buildings that will survive earthquakes. 

Things that really connect to society. And wilder, which is bioengineering. So I'm going to show you, really quickly, a little bit of a sneak peek of what these look like. I'm not going to show you the monkey, which is very cool, though. I have to say. I just have to find my particular video. There we go. >> We've got a need for speed. The race is on to push humans and machines to new levels of performance. But just how fast can we go? I'm David Pogue, and to find out, I'm taking a wild ride on one of the fastest sailboats on the planet. 

$100 million of high tech know-how for what? >> We just have to win a sailboat race, that's all. >> Not just any race, but the America's Cup. These boats are so light and aerodynamic, they go three times the speed of the wind, but how? >> It might seem crazy, but this sailboat doesn't have a sail. Instead, it has a wing. This boat doesn't sail; it flies. >> Made of carbon fiber, engineered for maximum performance, one example of innovation pushing us to new limits of speed. In four new episodes of NOVA's miniseries Making Stuff, scientists and engineers reimagine the world around us, inventing technology to be faster, colder, safer, and wilder than anything we've ever seen. >> Unbelievable. >> LS3, get up. >> It's a world of surprising possibilities. 

>> What a good boy! >> Revolutionary robots, viruses that build batteries, even fabrics made of fish slime. >> I feel like an outtake from Ghostbusters. >> How do they work? >> We have a magic coating on it. >> I take it that's not the scientific term. >> We put the stuff of the future to the ultimate test. >> I'll just have this one for myself. >> Can we put nature's toolbox to work? >> We take inspiration from how animals are designed. >> It looks like a fish tail. >> Okay. >> So it's a robot with a sensitive skin. 

>> Can we engineer a super safe world? >> Self-driving racing car. >> So we really think that all the work we're doing ultimately leads to safer vehicles on the road. >> So you're, I'm not doing anything right now. >> Going to find the shortest distance between two points. What a smart little car. >> Or turn our ancient enemy, the cold, into a force for good. >> Come on in, David. Standard freezer door. >> Real world thermal -- protecting this building from sinking hopelessly into the Earth. In our high speed age, can we go even faster? >> 80 miles an hour. 

>> It's a bike. >> This is the world's fastest treadmill. >> A dramatic improvement in a matter of minutes. >> There's got to be a faster way to load an airplane. >> There is a faster way to load an airplane. >> Why did you ship yourself in Styrofoam? >> This way I don't have to stand in the security line at the airport. >> The latest innovations will transform the way we commute, compute, even cure disease. >> A small plastic chip that has about one hundred microneedles to allow the delivery of our vaccine. >> We're giving our material world a makeover. >> This is really not to protect us so much as it is to protect the fungus. 

We're actually using the living material as insulation. >> Welcome to the future. >> Discovering the bold new shape of things to come. And all new Making Stuff, coming this fall on NOVA. >> Great. So David Pogue here would be analogous to the three little pigs in the sense that he's sort of our approachable guide through a lot of these different types of narratives and experiences. But the same sort of applies in terms of how to bring that sort of narrative and interest beyond, once you get interested in the program, it's what do we do next. And so, one of the ways we did that around Making Stuff particularly was we looked to a new sort of pedagogy, or I should say a really growing sort of pedagogy, and that is one called making. You might have heard of the maker movement, the do-it-yourself movement, making. They just had the World Maker Fair last weekend in New York City, and David Pogue and we were able to go there with him to sort of highlight the program. 

But what we did was we took these themes, these four major themes and some of the stories within them, and used them as an inspiration to create maker curriculum, maker projects that are connected to, in this case we have wilder in the upper left where they actually create one talon of a bird claw and then move it into an entire claw. The thing about making and trying to, as an educator who tries to turn this into somewhat sort of a curriculum and a project box or how to guide people through this, what's really challenging with the making is that it really has to stay true to the more open-ended play, nature, that's so important that members of our panel talked about earlier. Not telling them, here's the recipe, go do X, Y, and Z, build it and great you have a claw, but it's to balance the open-ended play with, in this case, the narrative, the narrative of getting some sort of inspiration from nature, which is what wilder is about. And then to enable that open-ended play but to stay sort of connected to a broader structure of design, of engineering and design. What Rosemarie showed, which was think about it, design, hypothesize, build, test, but we don't tell you how to do it. So there's a fine balance in creating a maker type of curriculum. We're in the final stage of doing that. It was really a great experience to sort of, and I think it's one that any educator would probably find valuable in figuring out how you can sort of take your lab experiences, or as a parent at home, and give them sort of a narrative or a motivation for doing some of these projects but not telling them exactly how. Just giving them the materials and seeing what they do. So we have building cars and trying to figure out how to make them faster. 

Over here on the bottom right, what might look like gumdrops and toothpicks is indeed a series of explorations into building structures, and then, in the end, putting them on shake tables and seeing if your structures can survive a sort of simulated earthquake. And it gets to things like if it's too tall, it will topple over, and they have to make the base bigger. So it's kind of neat how they come to, in their own exploration, some of the things that architects and engineers have to deal with every day. And then on the left here we have making things colder, which is about insulators, building them into your own personal cooling devices. And this is in the process of currently being distributed across, we're growing a coalition of 75 outreach sites with a combination of museums, science centers, anyone who wants to apply, and they're still being, people are still applying to get one of these kits. If you're really interested in bringing making into your institution, your school and that, it's not too late to register for one of these free kits. And you'll notice these locations are not selected. I simply needed to put red pins on a map so that you could see we're going to be at 75 sites near you, or hopefully one near you, in January through March of 2014, which is when we're going to really be doing a lot of our focused outreach. Why January through March? Well, within that time frame we have National Engineers Week as well as NanoDays, which is a lot of the nanotechnology partners that we work with in material science do their outreach efforts in February. We have a website where you can register and sign up if you'd like to get a kit. 

Or you can just see me afterward and I'd be happy to point you in the right direction. So, moving from the sort of more hands-on play, children, anybody can get involved, into the more conversation. This is sort of an outreach strategy that really is most targeted to and we find most interesting to the sort of 18- to 35-year-old crowd where they like to get together locally and really talk about some of these issues or meet a scientist or person practicing in this field or deal with something like, for example, water issues are different depending what part of the country you're in, if you're dealing with droughts in Texas versus watershed issues in Denver. So these can look very different depending on where you're at, and we want to sort of nurture that diversity of local community discussion. So, we have, anybody here every been to a science cafe? Great. We had one here last night. Have you heard of a science cafe? Okay, great. Good. For most of you, this is sort of new. Science cafes are sort of a grassroots effort that has been around. 

We did not invent science cafes. We sort of support and give an infrastructure and resources to a network of science cafes nationally. So, we do not put on cafes all over the place. Our audience are the organizers who do this in their community. They're lively events that really, at the core, is dialog. It is not, if it's a scientist who sits up and talks about here are my slides and here's my presentation about what I do and all that, it is not a cafe. A cafe really is about conversation and that. If they use a lot of big words, then they're not doing it right. So we support a national network and accidentally international network. We didn't plan on that. 

It happened and we had to fix our map to take international zip codes when that happened. However, we have over 340 cafes registered currently in 49 states. If anyone can get Wyoming on board, please. We've really tried. The 15 countries range from Brazil to Pakistan to Tanzania. So it's quite a surprising, they'll contact us and say we want to join the network and great. We support them through a basic infrastructure of sort of a community practice of helping them understand what a good cafe looks like, how to nurture dialog, how to prepare speakers to be good speakers in this kind of a setting. We also have a newsletter, and we have our own personal learning lab, which is the Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where NOVA and our outreach team, we host the cafe --. So we're not just the president, we're also a customer. Is that what they say? So, what we've started to do more recently, and the innovation cafes are an example from the Making Stuff series, is we host national conversations around particular themes and topics when there's a show or a compelling reason to sort of do that around particular shows that we know really have a lot of public interest. 

So, for example, innovation cafes are being hosted this month and the coming months around the topics from Making Stuff and that of innovation, design, and everything. Previous ones we had were how smart can we get, what are animals thinking, questions around the NOVA Science Now series, fabric of the cosmos. So it's been really nice to start playing with this idea of how to host these conversations. Finally, I want to bridge into the real authentic research and how you bring a narrative into real research. And that is what the NOVA lab site does. So this is an acceptance that the products of scientific research are digital in nature, increasingly. Big data is a term you might have heard before. If you haven't, you will probably be hearing about it more and more. But specimens used to be in Petri dishes and in jars and live in a lab and not many people could access them, but computer simulations, computer models, satellite imagery, digital data is exploding in the availability, but that does not mean it is accessible to everybody. Scientists might make it available, but available doesn't necessarily mean accessible. 

And that is what we're trying and working to do with NOVA labs. We have a teen focused audience, targeted audience, but we do recognize that anybody can do this. So, we currently have three labs that have launched on the site, and we have three more in development. We have one on the sun, energy, and the cloud lab, and every one of these labs has at the heart of it a tool that gives you access, easy access, meaning something that's manageable and has been streamlined, it's sort of a software design problem, to make these tools useable to teen audiences. And that's really the challenge in doing a lab. And making it, in this case, we have six different currently available satellites that are up observing the sun. You can access them. You can look at different wavelengths, take screenshots, pictures, movies, but you can see the sun right now as it looks now. And you can also go to previous dates. Like if there was a really big solar storm, you can go back and look at it. 

But it allows you to continually stay connected to the real data. We scaffold this with stories and narratives and ways to help you figure out what a good research project looks like around the sun. The energy lab is one about designing. This is an engineering lab more than a research lab for science. Designing, in this case, a renewable energy power delivery system, testing it against real weather data, and seeing if you can deliver the needed energy for any of these particular cities. And these are real. This is based on real data, and so you might or might not be successful depending on how well you design your system. So you actually get a challenge. You get real budget targets you have to deliver on. And where the real data comes in here is when you design you system it's tested on the real weather for that city. 

Okay? So we don't know what the answer is going to be because it's real weather data. And the cloud lab, which is the most recent one, is a place where you can sort of get a lot of beautiful observations of clouds, get comfortable with clouds as a part of our weather system and its importance in climate, but, finally, this is a picture of, this is 7:22, if you go the cloud lab today, you will see the global clouds as they look right now. And you can go back in time, look at storms, and layer particular types of weather data over it. So we really, I just had to show this because why do teens and people really like this site? It's important to us too if we're reaching them and they like it. They like it because it's authentic. They're like this is what the scientists really get to see, and there's room for me to do something that not everything is known in this area. And then my favorite is the kid who said, dude, my teacher is going to be so excited about this. We're currently producing two labs. Upcoming one on RNA, one on cyber security, and a yet as undefined life science lab. Are community is broadly, oops, sorry. 

I'll just leave you with this. There's other ways to connect with us, but we hope you get a sort of sense of all the different strategies for bringing these narratives to sort of a wider lifelong audience and one that parents can do with their children. Okay? I'm done. Thanks. [APPLAUSE]  >> Wow. Okay, thank you. Everybody, thank you. This was just fantastic. One more round of applause for everybody who presented today, please. [APPLAUSE]  Did we answer all your questions? I can't even imagine. 

Does anybody have a question?  Questions, comments, anything? We've got folks here with microphones. Put your hand up if you have a question. Yep, right in the back over here. >> [Inaudible]  I was wondering if anyone on the panel-- I noticed a couple of places in the Sesame Street where they were doing measurements and so forth. The US is unique in the world, essentially, in having two measurement systems that we teach little children on through bigger children. Is there any comment on how much that is setting the US back in STEM education? >> I'll start. With little children, and I'm curious to see what Anita has to say, we want them to first explore what we call informal measurement. So using, it could be a shoe or it could be a block, and measuring height or length, but it has to be making it clear that is has to be the same unit. Introducing units of measurement, and then aligning that with formal measures.  It's US focused. 

We're not bringing in the other forms of measurement at this point. Now whether or not that's holding us back as a nation, I can't answer. I'll leave it to someone else on the panel. But that's our approach right now. >> That is the work that we do with very young children. In early childhood, when we think about measurement, it starts with informal measurement. We introduce rulers usually-- we don't see metric right away but it tends to be much more, look, how many of the exact same size link is something long? Does it make sense to use something this small to measure this whole room? Or should you use something larger? But it not, at an early age, it's not getting to more formal measures.  >> Other questions? >> Could I just-- >> Yeah, please, go ahead. >> I think that's a really good question. I might be on thin ice here, but I think the reason we're failing as a nation is not so much about the specifics of measurement, but having children have a sense of curiosity and having children think, and create critical thinking skills. 

I think that's where the role of the parent and the role of the teacher comes in. Because the adults in these children's lives are spoon-feeding information as opposed to letting children ask the questions, investigate and learn from their experiences. We had to learn a lesson of Sesame Street. In our storylines the characters would go to the human cast and say, oh, we have a problem. I have a question. The adults were answering right away. We had to say, stop answering. You know? Put it back. What do you think? How do you think we could figure this out. I think that's where we're failing as a nation. 

>> Can I play-- I just want to add to that which is great. When we were developing the maker kits, the more open ended design type of projects, when we were testing them out with the kids, what was interesting was they would continually look to you for, is this right? And there were times when they asked a question and were like, how do we do this? The facilitator said, I don't know. I don't know how to make that work better. You're going to have to try it out. They were stunned to hear, I don't know, and honestly a little bit unnerved. The whole idea that you can learn through failure is counter to-- They're scared of failure, when in fact that is often the engine of creativity. Anybody who's a scientist or an engineer, or anybody honestly from pretty much any field, will know that you make mistakes and you learn from them. I say, getting them okay with failure, testing, redesign, and getting teachers and parents, probably, comfortable with saying, I don't know. Let's figure it out together. It's really critical here. 

That's our challenge. >> Great. Anyone else on our panel what to jump in this? We have another question on the floor. Right down here in the front.  >> Thank you. That was really interesting. I was intrigued by the first two talks and the issue of counting to ten being so critical. That seems so elementary. Why is that something that's so important as opposed to addition or subtraction or something a little more complicated? >> If I can jump in here. One of the things, and remember I talked about this approximate number system that we seem to share, infants have, non-human primates have, all these sorts of things. 

But it's still only approximate. Part of what seems to be happening with the verbal labeling of quantities, of counting essentially, and coming up with this one-to-one correspondence between the number of objects that you see and the labels that you give them, is that children are actually starting to acquire a different concept of number, this concept of exact quantity. And somehow, and this is part of the research study that I sort of just teased you guys with. Somehow this system for approximate number becomes retrained to also then represent exact numbers. Until you have a concept of exact number that is really only an educational achievement, things like subtraction, multiplication, any of those other sorts of operations, really can't gain a foothold in these brain systems. For me that's part of why it's so important. It really does take one type of conceptual system and retrain it to do something that we then build everything else on top of. >> And I would say, from an education standpoint, young children can certainly add and subtract, multiply and divide. When they're sharing things and they pass them out they're essentially dividing. But really young children, in terms of what parents' engagement are with young kids and what they're finding, is that counting comes first before you start to do that, and understanding what numbers of things are before you can think about putting them together. 

>> There's a sort of interesting tension too. You know, I showed this video of the monkeys being able to do some of these operations, but they're not doing them exactly. The choices always were one that was more or less right and one that was clearly wrong. What you can do is you can sort of vary the difficulty. You can have two choices that are almost exactly right and then it's tough to decide which one to go with. Or you can have on that's really different and it's relatively easy. One of the cool things about the study that Liz Brannon and her PhD student Jessica -- did here was they actually did the same thing with humans, college students at Duke, and with the monkeys. It turns out that as it gets more difficult for the monkeys, it also gets more difficult for the humans. You can see that in terms of how often they pick the wrong answer, and how slow are they in actually picking this out. So we can do approximate arithmetic. 

Even monkeys can do approximate. But eventually being able to do the exact sorts of things that we need as a stepping stone to all of these other more advance abilities in STEM field. It really does require that sort of counting. >> You get the sense this could have been a much longer panel today than what we have. Another question back over here in the yellow.  >> As a recently retired industrialist from industry who's funded lots of things in education for many years, I feel I speak for the business community that wants to help and represents a huge army. We look upon ourselves as looking across the battlefield of fragmented pieces. We've seen great stuff the last two years, and that's why a lot of us are here. Things like STEM connecter now tells over 10,000 different projects and programs that people can just pick and choose from, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The things I know from my DuPont days is that hands-on inquiry based science is really what it's all about. 

Somebody just said it, the best teachers are the preschool teachers. It's all downhill from there on in. [laughter] But you know what I'm talking about. We look for the continuity in the way we've never looked before. I love this panel because you're showing how these pieces should flow. The curriculum should reflect that and how they get into reality. So I applaud you but want to ask you, how do you see the hand-off from the different age groups. I personally believe in P20, if not further. You've got to have that in the criteria all the way through. The second part really is, what do you tell the local helpers to do with the 10,000 things verses the four you just recommended?  >> Okay, everyone's looking at me. 

>> Yeah. >> As someone who works in what I call the life-long learning spectrum. And that's the key word because you said P20. I'm going to go bigger. Why not? I think that, you know, especially with the more digital, social media, internet types of transmedia capabilities that we're seeing grow out of all fields, and especially education. You're seeing the capacity not to keep chucking it into all these silos, to just look at it as a spectrum of engagement. Different audiences are going to approach and enter that spectrum in different ways. But really, and that's why I was sort of showing that-- going from seeing to that initial interests and motivation and hook, to leading into a direct way to learn a little more and go deeper into it if you want to do it in a conversational way with the cafe or if you want to do actual research in a lab. There has to be these continuous ways to explore. That we start designing, as instructional designers, designing the experiences so there's always a connectivity between them. 

So that if you're watching a Sesame Street and you really enjoy it and want to learn more, you can go to the website and take the paper towel tubes and start designing it. When they get a little older they can do a maker project. But we have to weave those together and start breaking down the silos. Teachers need to learn how to make with their students in terms of hands-on projects. Parents need to learn how to do it. That's sort of, I think, where we're headed. Then the relationships and networks among people like ourselves. I know that we, on the practitioners side, depend a lot on the researchers, but we always build on these relationships. Knowing Rosemarie and working on how to go from parents to grownups, these relationships are important to build. I think it's easier now in Transmedialand. 

Is that right? >> Can I also add, what I think is unique about this panel, and it's happening more and more, is what you said, the P. This research is showing that we need to invest in really young children. We need to set this foundation. We also need to talk to the parents and to the teachers because, unfortunately, with early childhood education, teachers are not going into the field because they love science and math. They understand that they have to teach language and language arts, but they shy away from science and math. I urge schools of education, higher Ed, as we're training young teachers, to emphasize the importance that they can do math and they can do science. And they, themselves as adults, cannot be fearful. I think what you said earlier, by saying it's okay to say, I don't know. Let's find out together. Take some pressure off of the adults to always know the answer. 

It is about that transition. What happens is that you say, you know, it goes downhill from preschool. Preschool is a very exciting time. There's lots of hands-on, stimulating experiences. Then they go to K and they're sitting at desks already. How do we get more hands-on-- How do you get technology into the school? So that children are being treated in a much more sophisticated manner and not just teaching to the test. >> From an education perspective, I mean, you have poked the bear here. I want to give a shout out to those preschool teachers that I know are sitting here, that are really taking on an interest in math and science and are working hard to bring that into their classrooms. I also appreciate how much I've learned from them about how much children learn by exploring, and that us backing away, kind of setting stuff up and letting kids go. What I try to do in my courses, I teach mathematics methods for preservice elementary teachers. 

It's the early childhood teachers, so they're going to teach birth through about second or third grade. I really focus on the preschool. They get the content that they need for the mathematics as kids get older, but I want them to really think about how, under the auspices of whatever you're told to do in terms of teaching to the test. How can you also bring in other things into your second and third grade classrooms that let kids explore and let them come to understand how to do things rather than just practice multiplication tables, or they're making sure they're fluent in their addition problems. >> That sounds an awful lot like adaptive education. Right? The idea of learn, unlearn, relearn, because that's the world we live in now. You want one last word? >> Can I? >> Go! >> Oh, no. Is there another question out there? I don't want to take over. >> I think we are out of time for this panel. I'm looking back over here because I think our live stream is about to end. 

I know they've got another event they need to bring in. But please-- >> Last word. I want to just ask those who do teach younger ages. I went from teaching high school to a museum with four to six year olds. That was a huge change, but it was actually really cool. Not immediately jumping to the conclusion that a kid is wrong, or don't tell them they're wrong or whatever, to find the truth in it. I asked four year olds once, what happens to the sun at night? The first answer I got was, it breaks up into pieces and becomes the stars. The first instinct I go, phuff. But then, that's a connection that the sun is another star. The stars are the same as our sun. 

I mean, there's a lot of truth to that. First of all, I was blown away that a kid had obviously thought about it. So to find the truth and to help them connect and make the connections and not immediately jump to, oh, you're wrong. Just help the kids. That's my plea. Thanks. >> Right. One more round of applause for the panel. [applause] And come on up after. They'll hang out for a while.