Toying with science
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Toying
with
science
G
irls’ toys have a lousy reputation when it comes to preparing kids for a science career. In our preteen years, my female friends and I mostly dabbled in arts and crafts and played board games, while our brothers honed their technical skills with chemistry sets and model planes, cars, and rockets. No wonder boys gravitated to careers in science and engineering more often than girls. That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. But take a closer look: Toys and activities popular with preteen girls have many surprising connections to modern themes in materials science, mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and they prepared me well for the research I pursue as an adult. Take origami, for instance. The Japanese art of paper folding was a popular pastime for girls in the 1970s. Folding little swans and other creatures out of paper demands nimble fingers and precise sequence, geometry, and symmetry for each step in the process. Recent research has shown that this kind of spatial reasoning skill is strongly correlated with students’ future success in STEM* careers.1 What’s more, origami has emerged as a focus area in materials engineering and mathematics research with a major funding initiative from the National Science Foundation (www.efri.org). Recently, my research group has begun working on models of “auto-origami” materials, which spontaneously fold into complex shapes in response to heating or other stimuli. Macramé, the art of tying cords to make wall hangings and decorative objects, was another craft popular with girls when I was a pre-teen, and it provided me with a wonderful hands-on introduction to chirality. Knots are inherently chiral, with right- and left-handed forms, like the ᴰ- and ᴸ-mirror image enantiomers that arise in chemistry. Tying four cords in a sequence of right-handed macramé knots produces a helix that closely resembles DNA. Left-handed knots make a helix with the opposite handedness, and an even mix of alternating right-left-handed knots makes a
*Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
flat, untwisted ribbon. Any difference in the density of right- and left-handed knots breaks chiral symmetry, and the imbalance— what chemists call the “enantiomeric excess”—determines the pitch of the resulting twisted shape. Experimenting with chiral structures in macramé later inspired me to study chiral symmetrybreaking in random copolymers,2 lipid membranes,3 and liquid crystal elastomers.4,5 Many other art activities taught valuable lessons in symmetry and geometry. Drawing with an Etch-a-SketchTM made me a citizen of Flatland,6 and I spent many happy hours navigating a stylus over a Cartesian plane with knobs controlling x and y positions. To draw a straight line at an angle required exquisite control of both knobs, demonstrating the concept of slope as rise over run and hinting at the idea of a parametrized curve. Molding clay on a potter’s wheel gave me an intuitive understanding of shapes with rotational symmetry. With a SpirographTM toy, I inserted the tip of a pen thr
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