Hi Fred,

I like any attempt to set up a proper science channel, but I don't think
it will solve the problem of too few people choosing to do science.
Neither will any Internet thing.

I believe that any child is born with a 'scientific' mindset. Babies and
todlers experiment with everything, searching boundary conditions (see how
far they can go, both mechanically and socially), finding causal
relations, generally seeing how stuff works. This is the natural way of
learning things. Anyone who has ever talked to a child in the 'why'-phase
knows that kids can be annoyingly inquisitive. I admit that they usually
don't have ethics in place yet (pulling of legs/wings from bugs to see how
it responds), but that is part of a social development that occurs later.

Kids also have a very good sense of logic. You notice that during their
language development: they treat language logically and therefore go wrong
with all the silly exceptions that we have introduced over time. They also
tend to point out the flawed logic of social conventions and other
systems.

At some point this 'scientific' nature is either lost or kept. I think it
is sometime in the last years of primary school and the first years if
secondary school. Children loose interest in science when they are no
longer fascinated by the subject due to lack of input by teachers and
parents (who have done an MBA).
In the Netherlands, the average (young) primary school teacher has a hard
time doing basic arithmatic. You cannot expect them to excite children
with captivating stories about life, the universe and everything. You
should expect such things from scientists who are passionate about their
subject.
I think that the solution lies there, scientists should go to schools more
often to keep the scientific interest in children alive. During my PhD I
have spent loads of time going to high schools telling about
bioinformatics. We set up a sucessful short course for kids in the final
years of secondary school. We are currently testing something for the
first years of seconday schools and we are trying to develop something for
primary schools (which is quite difficult). There are loads of projects of
this type and they are well-recieved by pupils. They help kids to get a
better view of what science is and what scientists do. And they keep them
interested in the subject.

I really believe that if every scientist would spend a week per year
getting/keeping kids excited about science, we really wouldn't need a TV
channel to grasp their attention.

My n cents.

Cheers,
Robbie Joosten