Woman's Hour - Parenting: Nanogirl

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

You don’t need qualifications to teach your children about science. The founder of Nanogirl, aka Dr Michelle Dickinson, who set up a nanomechanical testing lab in New Zealand has created a cookbook to teach children about cooking and science at the same time. Michelle joins Jenni to talk about the significance of nanotechnology and easy ways for non-scientific parents to get their children into it.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the latest Woman's Hour podcast for parents. Today we talk to Dr Michelle Dickinson, a nanotechnologist working with very small things who blogs as Nanogirl. Michelle has a PhD and set up the first nanomechanical testing laboratory in New Zealand, but she's adamant that parents don't need scientific qualifications to teach their children about science. She's written a kind of recipe book for parents and children called The Kitchen Science Cookbook with instructions for making edible earthworms, candy crystals and unicorn noodles. Edible earthworms is a beautiful recipe that teaches you about how things go from solids and liquids and how things change phase.

And basically you stick some jelly, preferably some red jelly, so strawberry or cherry. You put a little bit of green food coloring in so they go brown. You stick them into a straw. You let them set overnight and then you squeeze them out like a big juicy spot and bendy straws are the best because then they get the little ridges on the neck where the earthworm would and it looks like an earthworm and the kids love it because they're running around pretending they're eating worms and they've learned about cross-linking and solidification and all the cool science stuff too. Now, what does a nanotechnologist actually do?

Yeah, so I'm an engineer by training. And as I've gone through my career, I've started to work on smaller and smaller things. So it's just a size scale. So if you have a metre and then a centimetre and then a millimetre, if you go all the way down, you have a nanometre. And if you look at the width of your hair right now, if you can see the width of your hair, now if you can see the width of your hair that's about 100 000 nanometers wide so i build things that are 100 000 times smaller than

the width of your hair and where might we encounter them everywhere everywhere the thing with nanotechnology is it's invisible to your eyes um and so you can't see them but they're in all of your smart devices they're on most of your surfaces are probably on your glass windows at home they're literally everywhere providing a function that you probably didn't even know existed and so they're making your smart devices smarter in technology a lot of windows now have a coating on that means that they just use the rain and the sun to keep them clean as opposed to you needing to clean them and they're in your sunscreen they're in your makeup they're literally everywhere. Now you didn't do well in science at school so how did you develop

a really rather high-flying scientific career? Yeah it's weird so I wasn't very good at school and and I didn't realize at the time that it's because I'm a kinesthetic learner that's a very long word that nobody seems to explain to children but I learn with my hands's because I'm a kinesthetic learner. That's a very long word that nobody seems to explain to children. But I learn with my hands. And so I'm a good tinkerer. I'm a good builder of things. And so I was great at woodwork and shop and those subjects that tend not to be, you know, academically celebrated. But I wasn't very good at writing essays. And I wasn't very good at multiple choice questions. And so although I loved doing science and tinkering and building things at home, I didn't do very well in my exams at school and didn't think I was going to go very far in life because the academic system

seems to celebrate if you can regurgitate something and pass an exam, then this is, you know, this is your career path. So I got two D's and an E at my A levels which is not ideal didn't get into university and thought well that's the end of that then and I don't have academic parents so my parents didn't graduate high school so there was no real guidance for me as to what to do next other than go work you know in a in a job My mum was a barmaid and I knew bar work was a career. And then somebody said to me, do you know that there's this thing called clearing? And I said, what's clearing? They said, it's where riffraff like you might get into university. And so luckily for me, clearing existed and allowed somebody like me who wasn't

academic in the traditional sense, but actually was a great engineer to get into the University of Manchester to do a degree in materials engineering to thrive because it was so hands on and I built all of these amazing things. And then to learn about the system and to learn about how to do exams and how to, you know, for me, I built a lot of 3d models at home to try and understand what the books were telling me. So what prompted the kitchen science cookbook? So I've been an engineer now for 20 years. I've worked for some of the top companies in the world in Silicon Valley. I've worked, you know, Apple, Intel, Microsoft. I've been really living in the future around technology and every engineering team that I've led and been part of, I've been really frustrated about the lack of diversity. So that's lack of women, lack of people from lower

socioeconomic, lack of people from ethnic diversity. And as a person who tends to be the minority in the room, I always find that sometimes I have a different perspective on things just because my life experience has become different. And without those perspectives, I don't feel that engineers are building solutions that perhaps are the best for everybody rather than being the best for themselves in the room. And I thought, well, how do we get more diversity in these STEM fields, science, technology, engineering, and maths? And I was seeing a lot of intergenerational fear. So mothers who would relate science and maths to their school experience, because they might not have done it since, telling their daughters and their sons, oh, it's okay not to be good at maths because I wasn't good at it. And it's really hard.

And once you say that to a child, you actually give them permission not to try. And so I was like, how do we get these parents, especially these mothers to realise realise that they're actually doing maths and science every single day and they're amazing at it. They probably just don't realise that they're doing it. Not all the recipes are edible, although there is instant ice cream. We've talked about the earthworms. But there is an erupting volcano. And what most amazed me was how to make a solar oven. How do you make a solar oven in which you can bake a biscuit? Totally. So you use the power of the sun. So you just use either an empty

cereal box or an empty pizza box. You cut the top open and you line the inside with foil, which is reflective. And then you put a little bit of cling film on the top. So it acts a bit like a greenhouse. And then you put your cookie dough in it and you leave it out in the sun. And then I put a little bit of cling film on the top so it acts a bit like a greenhouse and then you put your cookie dough in it and you leave it out in the sun and then I use a pencil or a chopstick to keep the top open and you basically heat up the inside of this pizza box and it cooks your cookie in your garden in your afternoon and teaches you all about solar power and rays

and incorporates cooking and baking things that many people are confident with in your garden. Maybe we will get some sun in this country in order to make the solar oven work, you never know. There are lots of plastic straws and bags in the book. And I wondered, how are you dealing with the whole issue of single-use plastic things? I love this issue. I'm a materials engineer by training. And so my whole degree initially was all about plastics or engineers, we call them polymers. And there's this whole, I'm going to schools right now and they're banning plastics and they're a plastic

free school. And I think we need to have a more mature conversation about plastics because plastics as a material are incredible. They solve some problems that no other material can. And in some cases, they have a lower carbon footprint. I think the challenge we have is we've been using plastics as disposable single use when they don't have to be. And so things like plastic straws and plastic cutlery, we throw away. But actually, it's really easy to keep these things,

to rinse them. And I think what we need to do is rather than ban all of these things, is think about how we reuse them, how we take care of them. One of the things I've done in New Zealand is set up a thing called Sammy the Spoon, where you take a plastic yogurt spoon and the children make these little, basically little sleeping bags for their spoon in the school. And they keep their plastic spoon all year. They give it a name, they draw a face on it.

And we show that these single-use disposable plastic spoons actually can last a child a whole year and they can keep hold of them just one final question you obviously you now live in new zealand where you set up your nanotechnology lab in auckland which i understand is now run by a former student what should parents be thinking about when it comes to science, even for the very, very young? So curiosity and discovery. People think that science and math is all about knowing the right answer. And it's not. Science is all about coming up with a guess or a theory or a hypothesis and then trying something to see whether or not you're a little bit closer to the answer. And I think that parents need to just let go of their fear of failing and just try some stuff. And it might not work. And I think success is a terrible teacher because

we tend to learn from our mistakes because we try them again and we try them differently. And so if we can remove the fear of failure and try new things. I think it's great for parents. I was talking to Michelle Dickinson and we had lots of response to her. Jonathan Moore said, great thing about disposable plastic things is we can dispose of them, not carry the mucky item around until we go home, wash it, dry it, then store it, leave for reuse in your work stuff. We stretch, said my kid saw Dr. Dickinson at the Hay Festival, and my daughter is now obsessed with her kitchen science book. It's brilliant. And Wilma said, brilliant stuff from Michelle Dickinson

on how never to grow up. That's basically STEM, right? And Tabza said, I totally agree with all Michelle Dickinson says. I have two boys and was told at school I was rubbish at maths and my O-level physics teacher told us girls can't do science. Now, we would love to hear from you, of course, with your ideas about the kind of thing we should be discussing in our podcasts for parents. Let us know. Usual ways for today. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's

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