Space professionals

A scientific paper published today in the prestigious Royal Society journal Biology Letters reveals that "bumble-bees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from." This is an exciting discovery that deepens our knowledge of the buff-tailed bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) and is described in an accompanying commentary as a "significant piece of research giving a novel insight in the colour and pattern vision of the bee".

However, there is a more important discovery that is included in the paper, a discovery that I hope readers of this blogpost and the original paper will share with as many people as possible – the authors, while researching the behaviour of bees, "also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before".

As you've probably guessed, the authors of this particular paper are not your usual research team. The research was "conceived, carried out, summarized and written up by a class of 8 to 10 years olds" from Blackawton Primary School in Devon. The paper is deliberately written in "kids speak", which, as well as being charming ("if we are lucky we will be able to get them to do Sudoku in a couple of years' time"), serves as a constant reminder that this work was genuinely carried out by young schoolchildren.

I'm not qualified to judge the significance this paper may have in the world of bee science, but as a science teacher I can completely agree with one statement in the paper: "This experiment is important, because no one in history (including adults) has done this experiment before." The students of Blackawton Primary School are a lucky bunch because they have had an educational experience which, sadly, most school science students never get to have: carrying out a genuinely original piece of scientific work.

The students were guided in their research by their teacher Dave Strudwick and neuroscientist Dr Beau Lotto . As Lotto says in an introduction to the paper, science is "the process of playing with rules that enables one to reveal previously unseen patterns of relationships that extend our collective understanding of nature", so he started the project by getting the children to invent games and then asking them to explain their games to each other. After a series of other activities intended to get the children interested in "understanding the processes by which we make sense of the world" the children devised a puzzle for bees to solve that would help them answer the question they had decided to investigate: "whether bees could learn to use the spatial relationships between colours to figure out which flowers had sugar water in them and which had salt water in them".

The experiment consisted of a Plexiglass "bee arena" filled with artificial flowers that contained either sugar water or salt water. In the children's words: "Imagine having a panel with 16 circles, with a large square of 12 yellow circles on the outside and a small square of four blue circles in the middle. This was the case for two panels, but the other two panels were the opposite, and instead of yellow on the outside as the larger square and blue on the inside as the smaller square, we had blue on the outside and yellow on the inside. The sugar reward (1 : 1 with water) was only in the middle four flowers inside each panel of 16 flowers".

The students observed bees attempting the "puzzle" and recorded data which they then analysed to arrive at an answer to their question. This is science at its purest and, as Lotto says, despite the lack of detailed statistical analysis, "the experimenters have asked a scientific question and answered it well."

Lotto is convinced of the educational value of his approach. The students will have learned a number of key skills needed for science as well as how to work in a team. Sadly, this may be the best experience of learning science these students will have in their school careers because they're unlikely to have this kind of opportunity again.

Students in secondary school routinely produce original works of art in their art lessons, compose original pieces of music in their music lessons and write original poems, stories and plays in their English lessons. However, except perhaps at A-level, it is rare for schoolchildren to produce original scientific research in their science lessons. Instead, they carry out the same "experiments" children have been doing for decades – measuring how the resistance of a piece of wire changes with its length, "investigating" how the concentration of hydrochloric acid affects the rate of its reaction with sodium thiosulphate, and seeing what happens to the length of potato chips soaked in varying concentrations of sugar solution. These are classic school science practicals and, while they may be useful for teaching some aspects of science, it is wrong to call them "experiments" because most students know what the results will be before they do them.

Lotto is clearly a remarkable man with a passion for communicating science in innovative ways (watch a TED lecture by Lotto here). As well as teaching neuroscience at University College London, he runs a "a hybrid art studio and science lab". Sadly, we can't put a Beau Lotto in every science classroom, but there are other ways to get students doing genuine science. Simon Langton Grammar School in Kent is exemplary in its approach. Teachers there run two research projects that provide its students with opportunities to do cutting-edge science. There is also some interesting work being done by participants of the Researchers in Residence scheme, which partners research scientists with school science departments.

My own school is not yet involved in schemes like this, but we've started an annual science fair where we encourage students to come up with their own questions and use science to answer them. We've had projects ranging from "is the chlorine in my swimming pool bad for my hair?" to "do branded soft drinks taste better than generic supermarket versions of the same drink?". Sure, our students might not discover things as new or exciting as the children from Blackawton or Simon Langton Grammar schools, but we are at least giving them the opportunity to do experiments that they have genuinely devised for themselves. We've started with one year group, year 10, but my hope is that it's something we'll be able to extend across the whole school in years to come.

The Blackawton Primary School students are lucky, not just because they have had their work published in a prestigious scientific journal, but because they were given a wonderful opportunity to experience something that most people fail to appreciate at school: science is a creative activity. What a thrill it must have been for the Blackawton students to learn that they'd found out something that no one else has known before. I can't help but think that if we could offer this kind of experience to all our children, more of them would leave school convinced that science is "cool and fun".