One of my academic and artistic highlights came when I was in the fourth grade.
Just like every other school in the country, Blacklock Elementary in Langley, B.C., had a science fair each year, and my science fair project that year was on the solar system. My dad and I painted Styrofoam balls, scaled to the size of the planets and the sun, and the colour commonly associated with that planet or star. For example, the largest ball was reserved for the sun, and it was painted yellow.
We even affixed rings to Saturn to add to the project. Moons were omitted.
For each planet, I listed some interesting facts, likely pulled from an encyclopedia at home.
To my surprise, I earned a gold ribbon for the project.
Of course, that was more than 30 years ago. That science fair project is somewhere at my parents’ farm, gathering dust. But a gold ribbon in a science fair was something to be proud of.
Covering the science and technology fair at Pleasantdale School last week served as a reminder of how much times have changed over the years. Those little factoids on each planet have been replaced by display boards, colourfully and creatively designed.
Of greater significance, to me, anyways, is that many of the projects incorporated a laptop.
Those laptops helped with information and interaction, and they provided a different approach to how people viewed projects.
Perhaps my ribbon-winning Grade 4 solar system would have had a much different appearance if we would have had the technological capabilities we do now. Or perhaps I still would have gone with painted Styrofoam balls, thanks to the lack of technological acumen in my immediate family.
Regardless, times have changed.
If you would have asked my Grade 4 class about laptop computers, we might have stared at you blankly. By the time 1988 rolled around, there were laptops on the market, but they were still pretty bulky and cumbersome, and largely reserved for the business world. The technology was in its relative infancy.
Many of my classmates were impressed that the TV remote control had been invented. We could change the channel by pressing a few buttons. No more getting up to change the channel by turning the knob on the TV. And the channel choice. We suddenly had about 40 channels instead of 13 to select from, and specialty channels like TSN.
A laptop? What was that?
Now the kids know about laptops, tablets, smart phones, smart TVs and other forms of technology by the time they enter elementary school. They can’t imagine getting up to change the channel on the TV. Many will have cellular phones long before they graduate elementary school, and could understand and explain the operations of those phones in ways that I never could.
When I was a kid, we wondered what the future would look like. Would it be like a scene from Back to the Future 2, with hover skateboards and other gadgets and gizmos that we couldn’t have at that time?
What kind of vehicles would we drive? Would we have flying cars? For us, that thought was exciting. When I was in the fourth grade and working on my solar system project, we were just a few years away from getting our driver’s licence. (Although five or six years seems like an eternity when you’re nine or 10 years old).
We couldn’t have imagined smart phones. At that point, many people still had rotary phones. Most phones still had chords. I don’t remember ever seeing a cellular phone or a car phone until the early 1990s.
I thought my Commodore 64 had pretty snazzy graphics, and I marvelled at the Power Pad for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
A science fair in which the kids incorporate computers into the project? I never would have imagined it.
This will be the refrain for the kids who were at Pleasantdale’s science and technology fair last week. They should be proud of their efforts, regardless of whether they took top spot or not. They worked hard on their projects, and many of them worked in teams, showing an ability to collaborate.
But when they look back on their science fair projects from when they were in elementary school, they’ll see how much times have changed. They’ll remember how they had laptops incorporated with their projects, and how some adults marvelled at the use of technology.
In 30 years, there will be new technologies that will have completely revolutionized projects for that generation. Perhaps it will be a science and a virtual reality fair. Or maybe the presentation of those projects will be completely different.
Regardless, it will be a different time for them.
As for me, in another 30 years, when I view the projects at a school science fair, I’m going to think “boy, things sure have changed in the last 60 years. I remember, back in the fourth grade, when I won a gold ribbon…”
