All children are little scientists
Adults can help dispel the myth that science isn’t for everyone
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Developmental psychologist Eddie Brummelman recently created a program called Lil’Scientist to broaden children’s horizons by offering children inclusive images of science and scientists and enabling them to do science. Annie Brookman-Byrne asks Eddie why this program was needed and what it might achieve.
Annie Brookman-Byrne: You say that every child is born a scientist. What do you mean by that?
Eddie Brummelman: Children are born with an incredible capacity for science. They form theories about how the world works, generate hypotheses, gather data, and revise their theories in light of new evidence.
They do so with a level of curiosity and perseverance that we as adults can only envy. Consider how they learn to walk. You might expect them to fall less as they get older, but they don’t. They keep falling, not because they aren’t improving, but because they keep pushing themselves to try more difficult movements. They discount the impact of their errors so they can practice basic skills to the point of mastery. We as adults have a lot to learn from their willingness to keep challenging themselves, failing, and trying again.
Annie: What stereotypes do children hold about science and scientists?
Eddie: Every child is a born scientist. Yet as they grow up, many children come to believe that science isn’t for them, that it’s reserved for a select few. When asked to draw a scientist, children often draw an older white man with glasses and wild hair, surrounded by machines and test tubes. Girls, children from minoritized groups, and children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds may not recognize themselves in this image, and then conclude that science isn’t for them.
This is not only unfair to these children but also harmful to society, because we need the brightest minds to address pressing societal challenges, from social inequality to climate change. If we perpetuate the stereotype that science isn’t for everyone, we exclude many people whose talents we urgently need.
Annie: How are people addressing these issues?
Eddie: There are many well-intentioned efforts to engage children in science, but they tend to share two limitations. First, they typically involve scientists presenting their work while children passively receive information. This implicitly suggests that children have gaps in their knowledge that only adult scientists can fill. Second, many of these programs are available primarily to children from more advantaged backgrounds, who have already been exposed to science and scientists. The greatest challenge is to reach children from disadvantaged backgrounds and to position them as active participants in scientific inquiry rather than as passive observers.
“Every child is a born scientist. Yet as they grow up, many children come to believe that science isn’t for them, that it’s reserved for a select few.”
Annie: How will your Lil’Scientist program benefit children?
Eddie: Lil’Scientist, an initiative of my research lab KiDLAB, is an innovative citizen science initiative that engages children as little scientists. Our aim is to broaden children’s horizons by offering children an inclusive view of who scientists are and what they do and enabling them to do science. We show that science is a skill that can be cultivated with practice, and emphasize that it is conducted in collaboration with others. And instead of treating children as passive recipients of knowledge, we put children in the lead, while we—adult scientists—are merely supportive observers.
At the end of one of our classes, our former lab manager at KiDLAB, Justine Brüninghaus, asked the children to draw a typical scientist. When they were done, one girl walked up to her and handed her a drawing of Justine in a lab coat, labeled “The best scientist.” The class had been transformative for the girl, who had previously thought of scientists as only men.
“We show that science is a skill that can be cultivated with practice, and emphasize that it is conducted in collaboration with others.”
Through Lil’Scientist, we developed free lesson plans that allow teachers to involve children in scientific inquiry as part of their regular curriculum. To design Lil’Scientist, we recruited scientists from a range of fields, including oceanography, mathematics, philosophy, Greek literature, psychology, neuroscience, astronomy, and information science. Each scientist was paired with a group of children. Through an iterative process, the scientists and children co-developed six lesson plans addressing the scientists’ areas of expertise:
1. Who’s the Scientist? Children challenge the stereotype of the white man in a lab coat and discover that science is done by people of many backgrounds, including people like them.
2. Thinking About Thinking. Children design their own thinking robots and use philosophy, meditation, and imagination to investigate how thinking works and how our minds sometimes trip us up.
3. Markets. Children conduct thought experiments to explore what should and shouldn’t be for sale in a fair society.
4. New Technology. Children open the black box of algorithms behind YouTube and TikTok, discovering how these systems can subtly steer decision making and reinforce stereotypes.
5. Plastic Soup. Children follow the journey of litter from their own neighborhoods all the way into the ocean, learning about microplastics and why these tiny particles are a big problem.
6. Word Wrestling. Children hit the streets as language detectives, interviewing people to see how age and place shape the way we speak.
Annie: How does the program reach children from disadvantaged backgrounds?
Eddie: We developed Lil’Scientist in close collaboration with IMC Weekendschool. IMC Weekendschool is a supplementary school for 10– to 14-year-olds from under-resourced neighbourhoods—areas with lower average incomes, higher poverty rates, and fewer opportunities for enrichment outside regular school. Over a three-year programme, professionals introduce children to fields such as journalism, medicine, law, philosophy, the arts, astronomy, and entrepreneurship.
Although we developed Lil’Scientist in collaboration with IMC Weekendschool, our materials can be used in any school. When designing our lesson plans, we assumed that many schools—especially those in under-resourced contexts—might lack time, money, or staff to develop and implement new materials. That is why we made all lesson plans freely available online, each with a detailed teacher script and a complete PowerPoint presentation, so that teachers can use them with minimal preparation. We aim to make it as easy as possible for schools with fewer resources to engage their students in science education.
Annie: What are your future plans for Lil’Scientist?
Eddie: We want Lil’Scientist to grow into a platform that teachers around the world can use to engage children as scientists. Although we developed this program in the Netherlands, our ambition is to adapt and co-create lesson plans with local partners in diverse international settings.
In the long term, we hope to help reshape how children see science: as something that is done by people like them, to explore questions that matter to us all.
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Footnotes
This work was supported by a NWO Dutch Research Agenda (NWA) Science Communication Grant (NWA.1397.21222.014).
Eddie Brummelman is an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, a Jacobs Foundation Research Fellow 2021-2023, and chair of The Young Academy (De Jonge Akademie) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
Brummelman’s work is situated at the intersection of developmental psychology and educational science. He studies the developing self: how children develop self-views, how these self-views shape mental health and educational outcomes, and how interventions that target self-views can help at-risk children flourish. Brummelman is committed to using basic science to address social problems, such as the growing problem of inequality in education.