Finding formula to spark science

IT'S odd the things you learn when you've got children. For instance, that giant among dinosaurs, the diplodocus, apparently couldn't digest the plants it ate so had to swallow rocks to help mash up the leaves inside its enormous stomach.

Then there's the breed of spider which squirts some kind of liquid ("is it wee, mummy?") from its rear end at any bird that dare even think about eating it for breakfast.

It's stranger even to think that these are scientific facts, nailed down at some point by palaeontologists and naturalists. It doesn't feel like science as I knew it, but then I barely scraped O Grades in biology and chemistry and suffered the ignominy of being given a "no award" in physics (although I blame that on forgetting my calculator rather than the formulae).

At the moment, dinosaurs and the strange lives of creepy crawlies trigger pure fascination in my son's three-year-old mind, and I can only hope that science, in all its forms, continues to do so. But if it's still taught in the same fashion it was when I was at school, I have my doubts.

The only lessons which have stayed with me from science classes are that ticker tape can prove a trip hazard (it was something to do with time and motion), never to touch a tripod with bare hands after a Bunsen burner has been flaming underneath it for a double period of chemistry (a basic law of physics apparently) and how the process of osmosis works. Pity it didn't seem to happen when it came to revision.

Of course things are different now. Some elements of science have become almost trendy thanks to television shows like Brainiac and even CSI. And then there's Edinburgh's Science Festival, now in its 20th year and currently running at the Assembly Rooms.

There, children can really to get to grips with how science affects everything, from robotics to global warming to the garden worm's role in making compost. But what the festival also does, but which doesn't get quite so much publicity, is run Generation Science, the UK's largest touring science education programme.

Through shows and workshops it tries to turn on the minds of 55,000 primary children every year to the wonders of science – and it does so very successfully.

The problem though is that this effort, for most children anyway, stops at high school level. Admittedly, the bangs and bombs of Dr Bunhead can't be replicated in every secondary school lab on a daily basis, but when children's minds have been so inspired by such antics that they really want to know the science behind them, then the teaching of the fundamentals has to prove just as exciting.

Furthermore, young people have to be shown the possible outcomes, the reasons for bothering to study science in the first place – why it's relevant, what they can make with their knowledge, where it can take them in the world, and the financial rewards it can reap.

All of this is constantly at the forefront of the mind of Dr Simon Gage, the Science Festival's director. He believes that science education is not being given the priority it needs if Scotland is to produce a population with enough talent to allow businesses relying on science and technology to succeed.

He likes to tell the story of two scientists in Dundee who had engineered a new way of making energy from sunlight. But they couldn't get the business backing they required to develop a new product – so sold their research to the Japanese. Their invention? Cheap solar panels.

Gage currently believes that the Scottish Government's enterprise minister Jim Mather, a man who built up a £31 million-turnover computing company from scratch, could be the person to put science and technology at the top of the agenda, in schools and in the economy.

But there's also Stewart Stevenson, the transport and climate change minister, who in a previous incarnation was the director of technology and innovation with the former Bank of Scotland. The current Scottish Government then is well placed to know the value of science and technology.

Scotland can't just rely on tourism and golf and whisky for its future economic welfare. The question for these businessmen turned politicians to grapple with now, then, is what is the cost to Scotland of not having the best science education system it could have?

Banter's not so braw
PLEASE, please, please, let the Scottish Parliament's equal opportunities committee dismiss the suggestion that it should undertake research into whether pupils face discrimination at school for speaking "Scots".

I'm sorry, but I just don't believe in all this focus on colloquialism. I don't care if words such as "iz" instead of "me" and "baa" instead of "ball" have been claimed as the mother (or should that be mither?) tongue, to me they grate on the ear, and worse, sound ill-educated.

This is the "banter" people laugh at when it's churned out by the likes of Jonathan Watson or Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill. While there are some wonderful Scots words like "cludgie", "stooshie" or "smirr", which deserve to be used and recognised as part of the native language, saying "cannae" or "ken" just smacks of laziness.

If I thought that a teacher was using slang when speaking to my children I'd be furious. To my mind that would be setting them up to be discriminated against every time they opened their mouths for the rest of their lives.