5 Reasons Junior Science is Essential

Junior science in High School is boring, right? Where are the lab coats and the particle accelerators and baby velociraptors you were promised? While you might not get to build a doomsday device or revive an extinct species in Year 9, Science can still be a lot of fun and set you up to get your Jon Hammond or Richard Feynman on when you enter the workforce. Here are 5 reasons that Junior Science is essential.

5 reasons Junior Science is essential

So far, studying science in Year 9 may seem slow and involve drudgery like drawing experimental set-ups and learning lots of pieces of information. But let’s take a look beyond that!

1. You get to find out how the world works

Sure, studying science in Year 9 involves writing stuff down, solving maths problems, and learning theory that isn’t as interesting as blowing something up with a laser.

But there’s a reason for this. Science relies on the scientific method to make discoveries about the universe and everything in it.

What’s the scientific method? The scientific method is a step by step process for making and validating discoveries:

1. Ask a question
2. Do some research
3. Come up with a hypothesis (Ask: “Why is this so?”)
4. Make an experiment to test it (This is the fun part!)
5. See if the experiment worked (This is the exciting part)
6. Collect and analyse your data
7. See if you learned something new (this is the cool part!)
8. Share the knowledge so others can do the same thing

Following the scientific method allows us to pick a problem, come up with ideas to solve it, and then test those ideas and share them with other people.

Without the scientific method, the world around us wouldn’t have any of the day to day things we need to get through life (air conditioning, computers, cars, toothpaste, Fortnite).

When you follow the scientific method, you are learning about how a small part of the universe around us works. This is pretty amazing and has really rad and practical applications.

Like what?

How the solar system works ☄️

You learn why we don’t we crash into the giant ball of gas at the centre of the universe. But also why it will get fat and gobble the earth up….in a few billion years.

Physics will teach you why that same logic makes it hard to walk up stairs.

You get to understand how all the sciences are linked

Wait, what? Yeah!

All of the science are interrelated!

Let’s see how:

• Physics is all about understanding how the universe works and the laws that govern it and the matter that it is made of.
• Chemistry is all about understanding how these laws make the various bits of matter that surround us. Chemistry is especially interested in how this matter can change.
• Biology begins by looking at how chemicals create living things but grows to examine whole ecosystems that follow incredibly complex rules similar to some of the laws of physics.

Mind blown, right?!

Find out the connections between art and science ?

In Year 11 (Stage 6), you start to learn about the chemistry and physics related to art and music.

What’s this mean?

Well, you learn how stringed instruments like violins and pianos make sounds through resonating bits of wire and the spaces behind them, or how the shapes of brass and woodwind instruments help create their wide variety of sounds.

You’ll learn why the frets on a guitar are placed where they are – it wasn’t done by guessing!

Similarly, you get to learn about atoms and molecules absorb different colours.

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2. You build some super essential skills

Science teaches you some incredibly useful skills for other subjects.

That time you spend learning things or writing down and analysing data are actually teaching you essential skills that you will need later in life.

Research

When you come up with the question you want to answer with science, you’ll have to do some research.

Research skills are crucial for all the subjects you’ll study in Year 12.

Additionally, having strong and methodical research skills are essential for everyday life.

Research skills can help you figure out:

• If a recipe is going to work
• Whether a mobile plan is good value
• What university courses a career requires
• Whether the stuff you read in the news is true and accurate.

Listening and observing

You may not want a career in science, but studying science will teach you to be observant. You’ll become more adept at listening and observing things.

This will help you acquire new knowledge and also take in what others do or say.

This will have practical applications for you in English, where you have to analyse texts and identify examples and techniques.

Scientific literacy

Scientific literacy is important in everyday life.

This isn’t so you can pick up the latest issue of Nature or read the latest reports from The Royal Society. No, instead it is so you can evaluate the claims made by others that affect you in day-to-day life.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s look at an example:

News reports declare that sunscreen is absorbed into your bloodstream.

People start to panic about toxic stuff in their blood.

But scientific literacy (shown here by Matrix Chemistry teacher Dr Wong) would help you understand that these claims are overblown and that you should NEVER STOP WEARING SUNSCREEN.

In this case, a little bit of scientific literacy will save you from risking melanoma while trying to avoid a risk that isn’t actually there.

Critical thinking

The biggest skill that science will teach you is critical thinking and problem-solving.

The skills involved in critical thinking are:

1. Analytical
2. Communication
3. Creativity
4. Problem-solving

Whenever you begin planning an experiment, you are starting the process of critical thinking

Critical thinking requires you to consider various pieces of evidence and make a reasoned judgement like:

• Develop a hypothesis for something, or
• Coming up with a solution to a problem.

A simple version of this would be where your internet goes down at home and your parents have you troubleshoot the problem.

After school, in your career you may be asked to:

• Develop a training program: Your employer asks you to develop a training program to teach new employees how to use some specialised equipment or software.
• Plan a solution:  You work as an electrician you have to rewire an old house to be ready for the NBN.

Representing data

Studying science will teach you how to represent data. This has many applications outside of science.

How?

Want to have a car one day, but know your parents will give you a hard “No!” Well, imagine if you could plot how the time savings from having a set of wheels would translate to efficiency gains for your study schedule.

I bet you can visualise that sick ride in your driveway, waiting for you, already.

Also, being able to represent data in accessible ways, and understand it, will help you survive in a digital world. Almost all careers nowadays require you to be able to analyse trends and represent data for different audiences.

Presenting ideas

Science will also help you develop logic and concision when presenting ideas.

Scientific results and data sets can be super confusing. When you’ve finished your experiment and are trying to convince people of your findings, you need to present them in a way that is clear and easy to understand. This means following a logical process.

This will be very useful for other subjects like English, Economics, or History!

Because you’ve learned to follow the scientific method, your arguments will be more logical and ordered, too!

Having skills in presenting scientific information will teach you to cut to the important things. You’ll be able to present information concisely and without waffle.

3. You actually DO get to do cool experiments

Okay, so you may not get to build a desktop Deathstar, make fireworks, or create human-pig hybrids as a Year 9 science fair project. But you will get to do some cool experiments.

Starting in Year 9, you’ll get to:

• Use pulleys and levers to lift things several times your own bodyweight!
• Generate electric fields and use them to pick up light objects like magic.
• Help the environment by designing methods to clean up oil spills.
• Setting objects on fire to observe their differences.
• Dissolving substances in strong acids.
• Making a chemical mixture that changes colour before your eyes!
• Set metals aflame that burn so brightly it hurts your eyes.
• Mix highly reactive chemicals together and examine the resulting explosion.

4. You prepare for the university courses you want to study ?

Want to learn how to build things at uni? Fancy studying medicine or computer science after High School? Well, you need to have good marks in some sciences for that.

Similarly, if you want to play with lasers or smash particles together at high speed in a university lab or research centre like CERN. Well, you’re gonna have to have done well in High School Science.

Science subjects are a prerequisite for many of the cool subjects on offer at university. This means that you can’t get into that course unless you can prove you did well in it at High School.

In addition, with the rapid changes in technology and computing, scientific literacy is becoming more and more essential for careers outside of science.

Have dreams of earning squillions on Wall St? That hedge fund your parents want you to work for will look fondly upon graduates with a strong history of scientific literacy.

5. It will prepare you for the awesome careers of the future

Want to build rockets or design the next digital behemoth?

Well, most of the really cool jobs of the future are going to require the sorts of skills you start to develop in High School Science.

• Programming: You’ll need to apply complex logic to solve problems efficiently.
• Artificial Intelligence: You’ll need to understand and predict how AI systems evolve, and how to control them.
• Digital Engineering: You’ll need to develop systems that simulate reality; something difficult to do unless you understand the laws of reality first!
• Content writing and development: You’ll need to be adept at researching complicated topics and presenting your findings in an understandable way.
• Marketing: You’ll need to be able to make marketing/product decisions based on available data.
• Health and medicine: You’ll need to understand how the human body works!
• Space mining: You’ll need to calculate trajectories and thrust behaviour to manoeuvre spacecraft.
• Mechanical/ Civil Engineering: You’ll need to understand enough about the materials you are using so that your bridge does not fall down!
• Climate change solutions: You’ll need to understand the environment and how different processes or decisions will impact it.

As you can see, Junior Science is an excellent opportunity to develop essential life-skills, and to prepare you for your future studies and careers.