It’s Alive! Taking Science Out of the Classroom

Science isn’t just the domain of engineering students, and experiments don’t always need a campus lab.

A popular passion for science is now being fostered by some creative online endeavors, combining science and creativity in novel ways.

Making your own pinhole camera; learning about astronomy at aplanetarium; constructing devices from electronic building blocks…. These are all ways to take science out of the classroom and into the ordinary world, implanting it into fascinating and fun creative products.

“How come that globe is floating?” “Why can’t I fill this cup?” Customers stare at the items in front of them, amazed. From the other end of the store ring out the sounds of laughter as a group of children kneel down and stare at a sandglass as the sand trickles through, creating breathtaking shapes below.

Hanging above the door of Mr. Sci’s Science Toy Factory is the business’s logo: a cartoon version of the profile of founder Kevin Lin, with the words “Science is Fun!” underneath. Lin, who is also the director of Yu­ma­man Creative & Design, explains that science often gives the impression of being difficult to understand, but with a bit of creative design, it can become both fun and beautiful. “And a lot of creative ideas start with science,” Lin says.

Reengaging the inner child

Having grown up with a high-school science teacher for a father and surrounded by children’s books on science and nature, Lin is no stranger to the field. He still remembers playing with a Stirling heat engine as a child, and believes that many other adults similarly remember their childhood fascination with science.

After getting his start in interior design, in 2008 Lin set up an online store called Mr. Sci’s Science Toy Factory, aiming to bring a designer’s creativity and eye to science and creating fun, interesting things that would reignite that very hands-on childhood fascination with science.

There are a number of similar operations in other countries, such as Japan’s Otona no Kagaku magazine and US website ThinkGeek, focused on DIY science toys for adults or on science-inspired creative products. “Science design” in Taiwan, though, is still in its early days, and so such products are rarely made locally, meaning Lin has had to look abroad to find products.

Lacking enough staff, Lin and his wife Qian Yun­yun had to make use of their free time around their design work to search for information online and travel abroad to attend gift and design shows, and even magic exhibitions, in search of products.

Having traveled the world and accumulated over 400 products in fields like aviation, natural science, and mathematics, Lin finally launched the website. Many of the more novel products make use of scientific concepts, like a faux-antique zoetrope that exploits persistence of vision, or a pen holder in which the pen sits on a cushion of pressurized air.

Exploring the unknown personally

Lin was convinced that his creative idea and website would engage the curiosity of potential shoppers, but in the first six months that the store was online, the anticipated flood of customers turned out more like a trickle. Then one day Lin handed one of his products over to a friend to look at, and seeing his friend’s awed reaction, Lin realized that the fun of science comes from getting hands-on about solving mysteries and exploring the unknown.

And so in 2012, Mr. Sci’s Science Toy Factory made the leap from virtual to actual with the opening of three stores, two in Tai­pei and one in Hsin­chu. Lin made use of his interior designexperience, creating stores full of lights and metal with a very steampunk air. It can almost feel like stepping back into Edison’s lab.

Uncommon, curious products like the “Butterfly Jar,” in which a fake butterfly flies around like the real thing with a light tap on the jar, an elegant faux-antique sundial, or the “Magnetic Sand­glass” with its fascinating black-sand shapes, do wonders at drawing in passersby. After two years in business, Mr. Sci’s customer base has expanded beyond the ­researchers and designers that it originally targeted, to include the general public.

In the past, Lin says, science was mostly confined to the halls of academia, but by building a bridge between science and design, he has been able to take science from the seemingly esoteric to something everyone can get involved in.