On Which We Serve: Where Life-lessons Are Learned By Edward Atkins

The Kids' Bear witness That Taught Me to Enquire 'Why?'

The PBS-aired educational program 3-two-ane Contact was one of the best things on Idiot box in the 1980s.

Merely sentinel the opening credits for this television show and tell me you are not totally, whole-heartedly pumped. All that activeness! That funky theme vocal! The counting backward!

If you lot were watching daytime PBS any time in the middle chunk of the 1980s, you lot might remember iii-2-1 Contact. Technically, information technology was a math-and-science bear witness. But, practically, it was a documentary-adventure evidence. Viewers vicariously jumped out of airplanes, loop-de-looped on roller coasters, and went SCUBA diving and surfing. They learned about the physics of the perfect baseball game pitch from the New York Mets and discovered techniques for all-time communicating with monkeys and computers.

A trip to a bubble festival became a way to explicate surface tension. The thing is, a decent portion of that particular episode is just people playing with bubbles and talking about the ideal ingredients for the ultimate bubble solution. (Somewhen they go around to the science backside a chimera's spherical shape; but at that place's a spirit of do-it-yourself experimentation throughout. "Sometimes you lot just have to try things out for yourself," says one of the evidence'due south hosts, a girl named Stephanie Yu.)

The show, a production of the Children'southward Television set Network, was congenital around removing classroom lessons from the school or lab surround. "Too many children remember that scientists are all middle-anile white males in laboratory coats," Edward Atkins, 3-ii-1 Contact'southward director of content, told The New York Times in 1983. "We want to innovate them to other kinds of scientists—women, minorities, people using science in daily life—without neglecting the middle-anile men in the laboratory coats."

So instead of but listening to experts explain scientific concepts, the testify'south hosts got to lead the way by asking questions—then interrogating what they'd learned by attempting experiments of their ain. There were trips to salt-h2o marshes, recording studios, lava fields, a remote Australian river ("to study a platypus, yous have to find one"), and archeological digs.

There's no doubt iii-2-ane Contact was an educational evidence, but it was open-ended in a way that made the world seem expansive and unstructured—pretty much the opposite of required educational tools like math flashcards and science textbooks. I remember equally a child thinking 3-ii-one Contact was merely as good as Sesame Street but somehow much cooler. This was past pattern. 3-2-1 Contact has been described equally "a sort of 'Sesame Street Discovers Science,'" The Times wrote in 1983, but for older kids, aged 8 to 12. It was also a kin to Square I, the math-focused program which featured Mathnet, the memorable sendup of the detective testify Dragnet. Naturally, 3-2-one Contact had its ain investigative subplot, in which members of the Bloodhound Gang solved serialized mysteries.

The overarching goal among the show's creators was to leave kids with "a inverse perception of what scientific discipline and technology are and what scientists do," Atkins said in 1983. Based on the impression information technology left on me, I'd say iii-2-one Contact succeeded. I didn't abound up to become a scientist, but I did shape my life around asking "why." And my expansive views of science and technology today mirror the far-reaching views of science and technology that were at the heart of iii-2-1 Contact.

The show taught me that trying to empathise how things piece of work is unequivocally thrilling. It was, in this way, a commemoration of curiosity above all. Finding an answer can be satisfying, but asking questions often brings greater joy than the certainty of knowing.

Incidentally, at my first-e'er real job, in a coffee shop outside Philadelphia, my boss, who was tired of my many queries, suggested gently that if I could someday brand a living from asking questions, I should. I was xv, and he was mayhap teasing me a bit, but he was also echoing an idea that I'd encountered in 3-two-ane Contact so many years before.

And anyway. He was right. So I did.