Gintaras Duda, Ph.D., a professor of physics at Creighton University, suggests looking at toys with a tactile, kinesthetic component that can help illustrate scientific principles while allowing a child to come up with new ways to play.
“I think if you can get kids to be creative, that’s the main thing,” Duda said. “Let them sort of figure out how these things work. It’s great scientific learning. Yes, kids love to play with the iPad, but if you dump a bin of Legos out in front of them and let them go, you’ll always be surprised at what they come up with.”
Last year, Duda taught a seminar at the University in the Physics of Toys. In the course, undergraduate and graduate students experimented with a number of different playthings, including Frisbees, Wheel-Os, balloons and something called a gee-haw whammy diddle, a two-stick toy that moves a propeller via friction.
“They really enjoyed it,” Duda said. “It gave them a chance to look back at all the physics they’d learned and see how it worked on what seemed to be simple toys. They all found it very interesting. I think there are a bunch of papers there on the whammy diddle because there are all sorts of weird theories on how it works.”
The Creighton students shared their research with eighth-graders at the Jesuit Academy in Omaha, who also found ways to manipulate the toys for more scientific lessons.
Duda said in looking for toys for his own young children, he tries to find something they can put their hands on. Building blocks, tower sets and a strangely-behaving substance known as kinesthetic sand, which shares certain properties with regular sand but performs differently as it’s being molded, have all captured his children’s attentions and imaginations. His seminar also helped reinforce some of those earliest lessons for students who had spent a long time studying physics.
“There’s physics in all of that,” he said. “When you’re building something, you’re thinking about physics, about how to cancel torque. There are all these great toys out there that kids can learn a lot about science from. It’s fun to see where they take that. I think a lot of students in my classes get to college and say, ‘Well, what do I know about physics?’ And the answer is, ‘A lot.’ You really do start to get an understanding of it from early childhood.”
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