Exploring the science of smell


Kodomo Science Picnic - an initiative to encourage children exploring science through daily observations - decided to produce workshops online. during the COVID-19 lockdown. We designed and delivered 3 online workshops about the sense of smell and visual sense. This is one of them.
We chose the topic “sense” because it is relatable to everyone, and doesn’t require special tool to conduct experiment.

Participants : 15 children between the ages of 5-10
Time: 3:00pm - 4:00pm on May 17th, 2020
Objective: Participants explore how smells affects our feelings, and come up with uses for certain smells in daily life.

The 2 main factors I paid special attention to are:

  1. To make the topic more relatable, we did a scavenger hunt at the beginning for participants to explore different smells in the products we use in daily life.
  2. To keep younger children engaged through the hour, I added many quiz activities that they could answer on the chat.

Structure:

  • Scavenger hunt: find 3 daily necessities (e.g. shampoo, soap, toothpaste), try to describe their smell.
  • Question: why do manufacturers put smell into those necessities even if the smell does not affect the actual function of them?
  • Explanation on how smell is processed by the brain: while senses usually send signals to the part of brain that is in charge of critical thinking, some of the signals of smells go to the part of the brain which is in charge of emotion and memories. That’s why our sense of smell can affect how we feel without justification.
  • Examples on how a specific smell can make people feel. (ex. lemon is refreshing)
  • Activity for the participants to come up with a smell for a situation they want to improve.
  • Explanation on the difficulties to extract smells from flowers or animals like sperm whale. Brief introduction to chemical reactions to create smells.