This project started as a community project for students in science and engineering careers at the University of Costa Rica. Our main goal is to find a converging point between Literature and Science lectures on primary school.
Historically, we are used to learning Science apart from Literature and because of this, there has been a huge breach between this two cultures since early ages.
We tried to address this issue by choosing a novel like The Little Prince to teach science. This book has many references that one can use to teach a variety of concepts from artificial selection to quantum mechanics. The great advantage of this novel is that for children is really easy to read and understand.
We made a literature workshop with eleven years old children, in which we let the children read the chapters of the Little Prince novella and then we related passages of every chapter with science concepts. In some of these passages we made just a conceptual relation to science, in others, we made experimental demonstrations in order for us to teach science concepts.
We obtained great results with these workshops, we were able to teach advanced science concepts, maybe concepts that one learns until one is a junior at the University, to eleven years old children by just relating passages of this non-science book with science experiments. We were also able to increase the interest in science in students that perhaps before this workshop had no interest at all.
This growth in learning and interest in science that we were able of generating on those children was our main goal overall since we were able of teaching science in a Literature lecture, coupling in this way these two cultures.
We hope to have this research published soon, a deeper analysis of the results and conclusions are awaiting referee reports at the Physics Education journal of the Institute of Physics.
Converging Science and Literature cultures: Learning Physics via The Little Prince novella 