“When we think of science, we often imagine people wearing labcoats and goggles, in a laboratory filled with glass bottles and flames, mixing chemicals and the like, and sure that’s part of it, but science is much simpler than that. Science is simply this: trying to discover how things work. Science uses facts that we can measure, and makes new discoveries from these facts.”

“But why would we want to know how the world works?

Well, there are lots of reasons. With science we have discovered how to make cars, boats, aeroplanes and rocketships. We’ve made computers and robots. We’ve developed life-saving medicines, and yummy food that we eat every day. The electricity that makes the lights go on, and the radio-waves that brings the television pictures to your home. All of these things and many many more came from using science and a thing called The Scientific Method.”

“The Scientific Method has four steps:

1. Start with a problem or question. For instance, if you find something in a forest, you ask ‘What is this?’
2. Look at what you have, and make some notes about it. From these notes, try to tell what it is you have found. ‘It is green and flat. It’s not breathing. I think it might be a leaf.’
3. If your notes are correct, what can you say about it that should be true? ‘If it’s a leaf, then it came from a tree. I should be able to see some of these leaves on a tree near here.”
4. If what you found out is right, then you have identified your object ‘There are leaves like this in the tree above me, this is definitely a leaf.’ - OR - If not, you need to go back to step 2 and find a different explanation for what you have found. ‘There are no trees around me, so this must be something else, what could it be?’”

The Scientific Method can be applied to any time you want to find the answer to a question you might have, from “Why is the sky blue?” to “Why does a cork float in water?”

“Part of science is sorting things into groups of like things. The first level of sorting is into three categories, plants, animals and minerals.

An example of a plant is a tree. An example of an animal is a dog. An example of a mineral is a rock.

Here is a picture of a cat. Now using what you already know about the world, would you say a cat is:

A. a plant

B. an animal or

C. a mineral?

Look at the cat. What are some things you can see about that cat to help you make your decision. It has fur, it has four legs, it has a tail and it has a cute kitty face. To plants have fur? No. Do rocks have legs or a tail? No. So the answer must be ‘A cat is an animal.‘”

“Things can be sorted in a lot of ways. Plants, animals and minerals can be divided up according to the things was can see and measure about them. Animals can be sorted into groups like birds, reptiles, mammals, insects, and many more, because of the things that they have in common with each other.

Look again at this cat. like we saw before it has fur, legs, a tail and a cute kitty face.

Next to the cat is a lion (rawr!), a snake (hisss!) and a tiger (rawr!). What do these animals have in common? What makes them different from each other? Well, the cat, the lion and the tiger all have legs, they all have fur, they all have faces. The snake has a tail and a face too, but it has no fur (it has scales) and it has no legs. Which of these is different from the others? Of course, the snake is different (it is a reptile), and all the others are cats! (The lion and the tiger are just very big cats.)”

“We can sort animals into many different types, just as we can with plants and minerals. In the world there are as many as

10,000,000 species of animal

4000 types of mineral

and

250,000 types of plant

WOW that sure is a lot of different types of things isn’t it? But sorting things is only part of science. A lot of science happens in the form of experiments.

Here’s a simple experiment you can try:

Fill a bucket with water. Taking a cork and a rock, drop them both into the bucket. What happens?”

“The cork floats on the surface, while the rock sinks to the bottom. Why could this be? The cork is light, while the rock is heavy. The water is heavy too, but it runs through your fingers and is not solid like the cork or the rock. The rock sinks to the bottom because it is heavier than the water. The cork floats because it is lighter than the water.

What would happen now, if I dropped in a rubber duck? What about a piece of fruit like an apple? What about an empty water bottle?”

“But science isn’t just experiments. The best thing about science is that we can use what we’ve found out to make things, to discover new things, and to help people to do things.

With our water, cork and rock experiment, we learned about weight and density. How can we make use of what we’ve discovered? Well we could make a boat, and sail to the other side of the world! If we know what materials float, we can make a boat using these, and be pretty sure when we are finished that the boat will float on the water.”