And so this is how we work. I let the imaginations of my students run wild. And my job is to try to collect the best of each kid's idea and try to combine it into something that hopefully would work.

What was really cool about this project is that the students saw a local problem, and boom -- they are trying to immediately address it. But my students in Hong Kong are hyper-connected kids. And they watch the news, they watch the Internet, and they came across this image. This was a child, probably under 10, cleaning up an oil spill bare-handed, in the Sundarbans, which is the world's largest mangrove forest in Bangladesh. So I was very compelled by doing the second experiments, and I wanted to take it even further -- maybe addressing an even harder problem and it's also closer to my heart.

You can see a progression here -- we've gone from a local problem to a remote problem to a global problem. So plastic, oil and radioactivity are horrible, horrible legacies, but the very worst legacy that we can leave our children are lies. We can no longer afford to shield the kids from the ugly truth because we need their imagination to invent the solutions. So citizen scientists, makers, dreamers -- we must prepare the next generation that cares about the environment and people, and that can actually do something about it. Thank you.

Vocabulary:

Oil spill, compel, legacy, shield