My Future Scientists

I watched a TED Talk today that inspired me. Children are actually brilliantly creative. Possibly because they haven't quite gotten to the point of feeling the pressures of societal expectations or the idea of others judging their work.
My theory is that children are all roughly the same. They may have different personalities, but I suspect that children are all in the same general range in terms of intelligence and creativity. This makes children somewhat like tools that you can use almost interchangeably. Tools for science.
The talk I watched was about using a bunch of kids to write a scientific paper. Kids love science. I can get My Future Kids to do science. Get them to write a paper. That would be awesome. I could get them to do it all the time. Once or twice a year, maybe. What are kids in elementary through middle school even doing anyway? Acquiring general knowledge and waiting to get older so they're easier to work with. Pah! They could be doing science! Real science. Not that stuff that's learning about other people's science. Real science! I will probably need to find out how they prompted the kids to get a question out of them and found the resources to try to answer that question. I hope they wrote a paper on getting kids to do some real science.
I remember trying to do science in 5th grade or so. That science was terrible. I only really tested things that I already knew the answer to and that would be easy to perform. I think the trick is to start by asking a lot of questions and then finding someone with a lab and the resources to help you answer that question.
I think the framing is important too. It's a lot easier to think of things to explore when you really are exploring. Much easier than when a teacher says "do some science for me, you'll need to start with a hypothesis...". For some reason it's a lot easier and more fun to do things that you don't have to do. I don't really know why. Maybe it's a motivation thing. Once you have to do something, the motivation is that you have to, whereas if you don't, the motivation is that it's an interesting thing that you want to do and can stop if you don't want to do it anymore.