🌊 Learning to Be a Scientist | Dr. Tracy Fanara | Ailani's Little World

In this episode of Ailani’s Little World, we sit down with Dr. Tracy Fanara to talk about the real journey of becoming a scientist, and how kids can start exploring science right at home!

Did you know? The best scientists aren’t the ones who never struggle, they’re the ones who stay curious and keep trying. And when kids get hands-on with science, something amazing happens… they start thinking like real scientists! 🔍

👩‍🔬 You don’t need a lab to start exploring, you can begin right at home!

👉 LIKE this video, COMMENT what experiment you want to try, and SUBSCRIBE for more fun science adventures with real scientists!

#ScienceForKids #STEMEducation #FutureScientist #HandsOnLearning #Curiosity #LearnThroughPlay #AilanisLittleWorld 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

When you were learning to become a scientist, what was challenging at first and what helped you kept going?

SPEAKER_02 0:15

So I didn't have perfect days in school. I did a five-year engineering program in three years. So it was really tough. And I was taking a lot of classes all at once. And a lot of those classes were really tough. And I would see my friends having fun. And I would be so jealous because they would be able to go to football games and go out at night, and I was just home studying all of the time. But the thing that you have to remember, especially going through school, even at your age, is that if you want to be a scientist, you got to keep your eye on the prize. One class is not going to make or break you. In fact, the class that I did worst in, I got a D in a class. It's called hydraulic systems design. I ended up being a hydraulic systems design engineer for years. You just really have to push through because it's all basically a filter to get you to understand how to research, how to do things you don't want to do, how to get over obstacles and get through hard things. That's what school is preparing you to do. Because when you get into the real world, you don't want to give up every time you're missing some data or you know your hypothesis is wrong. You gotta keep on going. And that's what school prepares you for. And that's why you have to have these obstacles where you get bad grades in a class, or some class is challenging, or you just don't want to do a class that is required for your degree. But you just gotta get through it because at the end of the day, it's all worth it.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Alani the other day had a bad grade and she was really embarrassed and unhappy about it. And we told her, Alani, it's okay. Mommy and Daddy had lots of bad grades, but it's about the fact that she worked really hard, she studied extra, and she she put in a lot of good work to get a good grade, and it didn't happen, but it's okay because she worked so hard.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

Yeah, those things happened. What class was it in? Um I think Vietnamese.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Vietnamese class.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

That sounds hard. Super hard. Well, good for you learning another language. That's pretty impressive. Most people cannot say that. Almost all people I know cannot say that.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

You run scientist programs for kids. What have you noticed about kids when they get to do real science hands-on? Can I do science at home?

SPEAKER_02 2:30

That's the biggest lesson that I learned and why I think school was so hard for a lot of people growing up at the same time as me, is because we were learning from books. I had a biology class that to pass the test, you had to word for word regurgitate the book on a test. And I would do it, I would study. Did I learn anything? No, because you're just memorizing. You're not actually learning, and you're not actually learning how to apply that science, which is the most important part of science. So you can take all the classes you want and memorize your answers, but it's the application of those sciences or how you use those sciences to answer questions that matters. And doing hands-on experiments, actually seeing and visualizing the representation of what's in your book is really important. That's a game trainer right there. When I was getting my PhD, I worked with a seventh grade class. Every single week I would teach seventh grade science for two full days. It was the hardest job I ever had. Teachers are amazing. I was exhausted. It was to get everybody's attention was near impossible. And it was seventh grade, so kids go through a big change in seventh grade, like before Christmas break and after Christmas break. I got two different sets of kids. Um and yeah, like I saw how doing hands-on experiments really helped them understand the concepts, especially when they didn't want to pay attention. Because if they're actually having to do something with their hands, they have to pay attention. They can't just like go into la la land or go in their head or look at their notebook. It's actually active and it's a lot more fun. And you can actually see how scientific principles play out in the real world. So I started running kids' camps in Tampa Bay called Mission Tampa Bay, and it's for middle school, and one year it was high school girls. We do a number of things. We cover land, ocean, atmosphere, and we're going out and kayaking and taking water samples and looking at how the water is matched up with the ecology, like what kind of animals are around, what's the sunlight there, like, what's the water temperature, what kind of plants are around? How are we building this ecosystem that we depend on to survive? What is this and what is this balance out there? And then understanding our impacts of land development, changing the topography and how water moves and what kind of chemicals it picks up, and then of course the atmosphere, the weather aspect, and how that drives everything. So we do that in my nature camp or watershed hydrology camp. And then the other one is a STEM camp, and we build drones and ROVs. Really? And yeah, and then we go and try to answer a scientific question by applying all of these tools that we learned how to use and built.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

That's awesome. She's doing right now. Her teacher gave her a piece of dirt, a cup, and seeds. Tell her about what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

I have a project in my dance class, so it's like happy forest. So I have to grow a plant, and I already planted it for like maybe three or four days, and it's already a tiny, little, tiny little like plants that I've got.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

It's a little sprouting, it's starting to sprout and pop up the water.

SPEAKER_02 5:36

Oh, that's so cool. Do you have two or just one? Oh boy. I put it in a lot of seeds though.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

It's it's one, it's a couple little sprouts though, but it's one cup.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Okay. Well, to do an experiment, you should have a bunch of cups. And then you change one variable. But that's super cool. Right now I'm trying to keep tulips alive and I am failing miserably.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

That's awesome.