I'm not sure I know anyone who voted for it in order to make children interested in it. They voted because they thought it was amusing.
However, my children, many of their friends and some of their teachers are now aware that the UK is commissioning a polar research vessel. They definitely weren't before.
I know of at least one junior school science teacher who has used this to seed a lesson. It's a point of interest, it's the start of a conversation. It gives science a different angle and a bit of colour. This is a good thing even if it was by accident. Sometimes we should just take the hand we were dealt and play it.
Imagine this A/B test - two classrooms of 6 year old kids. Ask one if they want to hear about the amazing research being done onboard the ship named after Attenborough. In the other ask if they want to hear about the adventures of Boaty McBoatface. Boaty would win every time.
I saw it on T.V. in elementary school. My teacher was something like a semi-finalist to be aboard. We'd been doing class projects all year as part of the competition.
As an academic exercise it's interesting as a solo project or as an adventure with a fellow researcher. With the kids it's effectively spoiling their vacation while teaching them things they shouldn't have to know or understand for at least a few more years.
I think the point is to get people excited about science and show what is possible/spark curiosity rather than trying to recreate a classroom. You can see this by all the kids that take his classes. There is space for both to exist.
This is truly great. I hope the teacher(s) are doing a bunch of follow-up work teaching about how and why this worked. Also use that interest to drive into other topics such as how the balloon gets its lift versus a rocket engine.
This type of out of the ordinary teaching gets kids excited about learning. And the best part is because it is exciting, they probably do not even realize that they are "learning", they just go home and talk about all the awesome stuff they did putting a balloon into space. And the talk of that "stuff" is all the stuff they learned without needing to sit and study from a book or have a teacher lecture at you while you stare out the window.
Well, as long as they're not going to eventually replace the teachers, I think that this is a great idea to teach kids. It's innovative and it will inspire them to actually pay attention to their lesson. It will also allow them to learn the lesson quickly, right?
It's not meant to teach you about people or pirates; it's a simplified tool used to teach concepts and methods of thinking.
Much like a two-body system is useful for explaining gravity, even though there's virtually no place in the real world where that particular example would be useful.
I think this is a great way to teach young children about the world in a way that resonates with them. So much of their observation of the outside world occurs from the seat of a car (for better or for worse). It's a big part of their universe; they often pay such close attention to every little detail, so the differences around the world should be immediately obvious to them.
I had a science teacher that would always find news articles related to what we were talking about in class. It was really great to see how this weird crap we talked about in class was actually being used in the real world, and how people were still studying things we didn't even know about it.
I don't know if this makes sense for someone looking for graduate-level knowledge, but it I'm sure it would make school a lot more interesting for children. It certainly helps to understand things if you know what people's motivations were and what tools they had when they made discoveries.
However, my children, many of their friends and some of their teachers are now aware that the UK is commissioning a polar research vessel. They definitely weren't before.
I know of at least one junior school science teacher who has used this to seed a lesson. It's a point of interest, it's the start of a conversation. It gives science a different angle and a bit of colour. This is a good thing even if it was by accident. Sometimes we should just take the hand we were dealt and play it.
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