STEM

A Conference That Is Itself Curious

Inside Curiosity and Learning, where learning about STEM unfolds in real time 

In one corner of the 17th floor of BU’s Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences, a three-year-old was holding a baby chick in cupped hands, learning that warm and alive feel the same way. Two tables over, a grandmother, retired from her own research career, leaned into a microscope display and watched a single drop of Charles River water bloom into a community of organisms she had not known was there. A few feet from her, a child was gripping a lime wired to an Arduino-based micro-controller board, his mother holding his other hand, the current passing through both of them as they pressed onto fruits and leaves and made a song together. She wrote about it afterward and said she could feel the energy moving between them.

This was Saturday morning at the Curiosity and Learning Conference, year 11. If you walked the room and paid attention to what people were doing rather than what they were looking at, every table was the same. People were noticing, and then wondering, and then asking, and then following the thread of their wondering, and then getting surprised by where it led. It did not matter whether the surface activity was a baby chick or a math game or a wind tunnel—the shape of what people were doing was identical at every station. Same posture. Same face.

Here is what was happening underneath all of it: 

• In another corner of the room, the Boston Area Reggio Inspired Network (BARIN), set up a 10×10 white tent and filled it with white furniture and 3,000 polka dot stickers. By the end of the morning, you could not tell the chairs from the floor.
• Greenfield Community College drove a wind tunnel two hours east from western Massachusetts so they could spend a Saturday watching paper helicopters lift off in front of a five-year-old. 
• Peter Holden, director at STARBASE Academy at Hanscom Air Force Base, ran a station called Crash-Test Creativity, which involves strapping eggs into student-built protective designs and dropping them from height. One of the designs on the test track had been built by an AI given the same rules as the kids. The point was not which design won—it was the conversation that followed.
• Cambridge Ellis School brought silkworms at different stages of their life cycle, and Bedford Science Center brought baby chicks at theirs, so families could watch how a creature changes from one form into another. 
• STEM From Dance set up a hula hoop physics lab where people recorded their spin times and learned about torque through their own bodies. 
• Worcester Head Start built Da Vinci bridges out of popsicle sticks and tested them under egg-load until they failed, which was the most useful part.
• Mass Audubon taught map-making to four-year-olds. 
• BioBus projected live water from Scarborough Pond onto a big screen until an entire community of organisms became visible at once. 
• The BU Microbiome Initiative folded paper microscopes out of cardstock and let people examine the world that lives on their own skin. 
• A Worcester Head Start station dissected, sorted, and rebuilt flowers as art.

There were also AI demos that made educators laugh and made educators argue, sometimes at the same time. AI.M Academy ran a real-time American Sign Language recognition station, with kids signing letters and the model catching them, while a Wrong Answer Wall filled up alongside it with sticky notes documenting the moments the AI was confidently and beautifully wrong. Researchers from BU’s Psychological & Brain Sciences Department demonstrated the video games they use to study curiosity in fMRI experiments. 

I have not yet mentioned the Science of Mindful Eating, or self-portraits made from natural materials at the BU Children’s Center, or robots and color-sensor coding from RASTIC, or Brain Healthy data tracking from Boston College. I also haven’t mentioned the 55 math games in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole that EDC was giving away free, or ScratchJr for early childhood social emotional learning, or BU’s GLOBE Mission Earth on weather and heat island effect and plant growth.

The range was the point. Early childhood centers next to research labs, Reggio-inspired preschool teachers next to robotics engineers, all of them in the same room on Saturday.

Holding the whole morning together were nine student volunteers from BU Wheelock: Emelia Frost, Gia Kim, Madeline Skopicki, Anna Arutyunyan, Shania Lee, Nora Ledeczi, Zaozao (Annie) Lin, Therese Lee, Rebecca Smits. Curiosity and Learning does not happen without them. The conference is, in many ways, also for them, as education students from across the college’s programs, from elementary education to STEM learning to global citizenship to educational design for transformative social futures. They were practicing the craft of leading discourse-rich conversations with families they had just met, networking with community partners and table leaders from across the region and watching how master practitioners draw a question out of a four-year-old. 

STARBASE director Peter Holden told me afterward about a child who worked at his table for a long time building her own project. “She apologized that she had to leave,” he said, “but wanted me to know she would have stayed if she could.” That is what this kind of learning does to kids: they lose track of time and ask if they can come back. It is the clearest signal we have that something real is happening, and it is the kind of moment every educator I know is trying to design more of.

The conference was not about curiosity—it was itself curious. As Danielle Scanlon, a Worcester educator, puts it, this is a glimpse of what learning looks like when curiosity leads. There is a difference, and you can read it on people’s faces before they have words for it, in the way the eyebrows lift and the head tilts toward whatever just happened, all of it arriving before the questions catch up.

TJ McKenna is the program director for BU Wheelock’s AI & Education program and a clinical assistant professor of science education. He directs the Center for STEM Professional Learning at Scale, and is the associate director of educator engagement and impact at BU’s AI & Education Initiative.