Teaching children to act locally, think globally


  • December 7, 2015
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   education

Teacher Cesar Harada's TED Talk "How I teach kids to love science" from August 2015.

Cesar Harada is a teacher at the Hong Kong Harbour School.

His August 2015 TED Talk, "How I teach kids to love science," shows how he took the life lessons he learned from his parents and turned them into a classroom strategy.

"When I was a kid, my parents would tell me, "You can make a mess, but you have to clean up after yourself." So freedom came with responsibility," Harada says. "So I grew up in a bubble of innocence — or a bubble of ignorance, I should say, because adults would lie to us to protect us from the ugly truth. And growing up, I found out that adults make a mess, and they're not very good at cleaning up after themselves."

When Harada taught his students about the danger that plastic poses in the ocean, they found the real-world application on their very own shoreline. So he harnessed their energy to work on a solution:

"It doesn't take too long before my students walk on a beach and stumble upon piles of trash. So as good citizens, we clean up the beaches," he says.

He turned his classroom into a workshop.

We collect this plastic and we grind it to the size we find it in the ocean, which is very small because it breaks down. And so this is how we work. I let the imaginations of my students run wild. And my job is to try to collect the best of each kid's idea and try to combine it into something that hopefully would work. And so we have agreed that instead of collecting plastic bits, we are going to collect only the data. So we're going to get an image of the plastic with a robot -- so robots, kids get very excited. And the next thing we do -- we do what we call "rapid prototyping." We are so rapid at prototyping that the lunch is still in the lunchbox when we're hacking it.

And we hack table lamps and webcams, into plumbing fixtures and we assemble that into a floating robot that will be slowly moving through water and through the plastic that we have there -- and this is the image that we get in the robot. So we see the plastic pieces floating slowly through the sensor, and the computer on board will process this image, and measure the size of each particle, so we have a rough estimate of how much plastic there is in the water.

So we documented this invention step by step on a website for inventors called Instructables, in the hope that somebody would make it even better.

What was really cool about this project was that the students saw a local problem, and boom -- they are trying to immediately address it.

Read and listen here to find out how his students shipped a spectrometer they prototyped to Bangladesh when they saw a photo of a child gathering water from water polluted by mud and spilled oil.

You can also learn how he brought fieldwork he did following the 2011 Fukushima disaster to his students.

And be glad that there are creative, dedicated teachers like him in classrooms all over the world doing what they do.

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