Jacob Strickling: Inspiring the Next Generation of Scientists through Practical Learning Experiences 

00:00
So on this episode, I'm excited to introduce Jacob Strickling, a mechanical engineer who has a passion for science education.

00:07
Jacob spent 24 years teaching science in the classroom. That's a lot of years, Jacob.

00:14
And during that time, he noticed that many students lacked access to hands-on practical experiences,

00:20
and that has been actually my experience as well as a student back then.

00:24
Determined to change that, Jacob founded Make Science Fun, a company that provides educational science services.

00:32
He also created Tiny Science Lab, which reduces the size of traditional science equipment, making it more accessible to students of all ages.

00:41
I met Jacob a couple of years ago when my children attended one of his online chemistry labs during the pandemic, that was.

00:50
And I was really impressed, actually participated in a couple of those online sessions.

00:54
He definitely made chemistry and science fun and inspirational for the next generation of scientists.

01:00
And I hope my kids are among those scientists.

01:05
So, Jacob, thank you for joining me in this episode of the Tech Explorations podcast. How are you today?

01:11
Very well, thank you for having me along, Peter, and the listeners.

01:16
Perfect, perfect. So without taking any more time from our discussion, I'd like to invite you to start by telling us a little bit about your story.

01:27
I call it the elevator pitch style introduction. So who are you, Jacob?

01:34
So born in Sydney and fond memories from doing science at the kitchen table when I was five years old while my mum cooked dinner, I had a set of candles and matches and cans.

01:49
And my parents encouraged me to do hands-on science. And I was always that kid who pulled things apart.

01:57
So I, you know, broken TVs and broken stereos to see how they work. I could never put them back together, but I was always intrigued.

02:08
Look, I was naturally good at science as a student. I always went well in the tests and the exams and I wanted to become an inventor.

02:17
And so I did mechanical engineering, discovered that I had a knack for teaching and explaining things.

02:25
So I went into teaching where I was the guy who was always doing the hands-on shows and the practical experiments, eventually started a YouTube channel where I could do all my fun explosions and projects at home.

02:39
And then that eventually led to producing Tiny Science Lab where I am bringing practical experiences to homeschool families, distance ed families. And actually now it's turning out that schools are preferring the small equipment to the regular equipment,

02:59
which I was a little bit surprised with, but that's just the way it's gone.

03:03
Yeah. I liked what you said about, you know, being young, you like pulling things apart.

03:12
Screwdriver was working very hard those days. I remember those days. Only I used to do the exact same thing. I left a lot of wreckage in my parents' house.

03:22
Every time I visit, I still find those old VCRs without their screws.

03:28
The only thing I guess that's different is that I never used to get good marks. My marks were average.

03:36
I guess then I went into academia. That's a different story though. So with Tiny Labs, that's how we met because we homeschool our kids.

03:48
So it was a great opportunity to get them introduced into, I guess, science, where we, the parents, are not the teachers or a book.

03:59
So I found your style really, really good. Like the kids... You were very... You're a very excitable person, especially when you're teaching science and chemistry.

04:10
And that's what struck me. And the kids actually were talking about it. So you definitely had an impact.

04:17
Could we take a few minutes to focus on Tiny Labs and actually how you started teaching kids? Obviously you are a teacher, so you spent a lot of time in a classic classroom.

04:31
But then you took that to the next level with Tiny Labs. So tell us, how did that start? What inspired you? And how did kids and the families accepted you?

04:41
Yeah, it's clear as clear as crystal, I remember how it started. I was doing my Make Science Fund videos with normal experiments and normal equipment.

04:52
And one day I saw an Instagram post of somebody holding up a small little conical flask. And I thought, oh, wow, that's cute.

05:02
And so I went on eBay and I found out that you could buy little tiny beakers as well. And I thought, oh, so what about if I buy a few in?

05:13
And I started doing some small experiments on the videos just because I thought it was cute.

05:20
And I showed some kids at school and they said, oh, you should do ASMR videos with the small equipment. I said, what's ASMR? And it's like that:

05:29
You whisper and quite creepy. And so I did five or six of those videos and thought, no, no, I don't actually like doing those.

05:36
And then I thought, I really should see if I can find a Bunsen burner. And there was no small Bunsen burner available, but techies will know that you can buy a soldering iron gas burner.

05:51
And with a small adaption, which is just a 3D printed adaption. And if you put a hole in the table, all of a sudden you can go from a gas torch.

06:04
And if I show you this, I'll just light it up. It's just butane, which is refillable. And if I light him up, you can actually see the flame there.

06:15
And if I block off the air holes, you get the classic flare. And then, I'll just move this back a little bit, if I push that into the table like that, I've got a Bunsen burner in the table.

06:28
And then of course, schools need and everybody needs heatproof mats. So if I pop a heatproof mat over there, and then if I get a CNC metal cutter plasma cutter and I cut a triangle from a piece of steel.

06:45
And if I weld some legs on it, I've got the classic tripod, like so.

06:52
And then from some Termimesh, stainless steel Termimesh, if I cut up it, I pop the Termimesh there.

07:00
Then I've got the absolute traditional, exactly the same Bunsen burner that I can then get my water and I can put my water in my beaker, and I can boil it up I can put my chemicals in and that sort of thing.

07:18
So, once I've discovered that Bunsen burner, then the whole world opened for Tiny Science for me, because in my mind, it's the first time we can have a proper burner at home not just like a methylated spirits burner with large equipment.

07:38
By shrinking it, it just becomes far more accessible, far safer, far quicker, uses less chemicals. And for homeschool families, absolutely perfect, because they can now do the same experiments as the kids at school.

07:58
But because I was a teacher, and a YouTuber, I could also then write the worksheets and produce the videos. And so now I'm offering the golden trifecta I call it, the equipment, the workbooks, and the videos.

08:16
So now it's scalable to around the world. Remote schools, remote students, they can have the same, if not better experience than traditional schools because one of the big problems with traditional schools and I was, I talked for 25 years and I didn't, I wasn't aware

08:34
of the problem. But when they when schools do practicals, they have four students around one bench, and only one or two students did the work.

08:46
Now, I knew that was a problem but I didn't think there will be a solution so I never thought about coming up with the solution. I didn't even think about it. I just went with it.

08:58
Then when we started homeschooling, I developed this equipment and for my own children. And then I got children like your, your kids to come to our place and we had groups of children.

09:10
And one day I had a room full of children all using this equipment. And then my eldest son walked in looked around and went: “This would be good for schools dad”, and I went: “It WOULD be good for schools”. And that's why we actually launched Tiny Science Lab

09:30
equipment. Now because it is so new, something like this, it's very difficult to change the way people do things. So it's a slow burn, getting it into schools.

09:42
But fascinating enough, I won't tell you the name of the school but I was in a school last week, doing an in-service with six teachers.

09:51
And I think it was the most expensive science lab in the Southern Hemisphere. It was the very best that money could buy.

10:03
And at the end of the day the teacher said, we're buying 16 sets of these chemistry and we're doing it in this room because this room is not actually practical to doing science the traditional way.

10:16
So that that just was like, this is, this is going to be huge. That's so interesting, I guess.

10:24
Okay, so you gave us a story, I think timeline, we're not talking about decades right we're talking about maybe three years.

10:32
Oh yeah, very, very fast production. So, very short. So, here's, here's the thing. If you can, if you, if you look back, thinking about what you've done the experiences that you had the feedback that you had.

10:46
Including last week's at the school, that shall not be named.

10:51
What makes your approach to teaching science, including the hardware, I guess different.

10:59
And what about it causes the efficacy of learning to go that high because this is something that I wanted to ask you of course, kids are having fun, but I wanted to ask you as a follow up questions after this.

11:12
What is your assessment of how much kids are actually learning. Are they just having fun, or are they actually learning chemistry it's fundamentals, you know, it's potential, future careers, perhaps.

11:24
Yeah.

11:26
My philosophy has always been to engage the students first.

11:32
I actually don't like the name of my company Make Science Fun. I really don't like that name.

11:39
I like the name Make Science Practical, Make Science Hands-on.

11:45
I think the students should first learn through exploring and playing, and I'm talking about the shampoo bottle in the bathtub squeezing it. I'm talking about an empty bucket in the pool where they're underwater and they pull the bucket over their head and they walk around

12:03
like a submarine. I'm talking about burning candles and looking at them. I'm talking about a syringe and pushing a syringe. I'm talking about blowing up a balloon, popping a balloon, lighting a balloon.

12:19
I'm talking about all sorts of... Any type of play with any type of equipment. And so the same thing with school teaching, I would be very, very short on what the method was, I would say what we're trying to find out, giving them a very brief description

12:42
of the experiment without going into too much detail but allowing them. It's a directed learning, but true hands-on practicals.

12:52
And after that, talk about the concepts.

12:56
So rather than talking about the concepts what are you going to see what are we going to learn first, and then I can refer to. Well when you heated water did you notice that first there was little air bubbles forming.

13:07
There was little air bubbles come from what happened. So, that has always, and I think the Montessori approach is through the hands first and into the brain.

13:17
I'm, I'm very big on that. Magnets and coils of wire, blowing on a motor, all these just exploring these concepts. And so that engages the students.

13:31
I actually then hope that they then go on and study because they want to study, and I've actually had quite a few students doing very very well and I can tell you it's not because I'm such a great teacher.

13:44
And it's not because I sat with them for a long period of time, it's because I, I guess I inspire them to want to learn. And then I let them go and learn.

13:54
I was very happy to have big classes of students who were going to fail, because they just weren't able to go well in physics. I was just overjoyed to see that they were in the class and doing their best.

14:06
That was, that was all that was important to me. Some teachers, try and get rid of the lowest students so that their marks, you know, the average marks are higher. No I was happy, as long as you're willing.

14:16
I was happy, happy to assist. Yeah.

14:20
So hands-on. I've always been hands-on.

14:23
That's the, I guess that the maker philosophy, where you basically want to engage with whatever you're learning, is not just an academic activity, learning like is whole body activity, is the brain, hands, eyes.

14:38
Correct. I always thought of this style of learning as kind of slow food philosophy, where fast food, you just basically want to go through the curriculum as fast as possible in order to mark it off your your list of as a teacher of list of things that you've got to teach your

14:54
students. Got that milestone. Got it. Bang, bang, bang, bang. I guess this approach that you're having where every kid, every kid has got his or her own kit, and then tries those experiments. I remember the ones that I participated in actually take time, just to do one

15:12
experiment could take a whole hour of the of the lesson. So this is something that if you just focus on the book and the whiteboard could take probably five minutes. Right?

15:22
So you can't put too many of those experiments together. But the impact to me and with my kids, and with my own experiences in this maker education style, the impact is far greater because then you engage, as we said, everything, and that opens the appetite

15:38
to actually go out and learn. And what you said earlier is like, after the experiment is completed, however long it takes, you can then start talking about how did that air bubbles formed? Where did the air come from? And I guess that's when you can start going into the kind of background of science, the deep end of science, right?

16:00
Correct. And then the application as well. Fish kills in warm lakes, you know, the air bubbles out during on a hot day. And so they will, they will link that heating water in a beaker to that fish kill and it will, it will bring it alive for them.

16:20
There's just so many principles like that, putting carbon dioxide into a bottle, putting it into the sun, and then, you know, measuring the temperature, the temperature over time, that then introduces them to global warming.

16:32
And I'll go, oh, you know, plastic and gas, it increases the temperature. And then of course doing it with a control so that you can think scientifically. So I'm very beyond scientifically thinking, collecting data, graphing, looking at relationships.

16:49
Can you speak a little bit more about the scientific method now? Because I guess times we live, right? What is reality? People of time, and why should I believe that information or that? How do we train the next generations, not just of scientists in this case, but of people that will be able to sort out these cows that we call everyday life.

17:18
What can they learn from, from your classes, from your, from your method, which I guess that's where the scientific method comes in.

17:27
Look, the classic scientific method is to come up with a problem or a question that you want answered, and then developing a fair experiment to test that.

17:38
So it might be something like, does honey, does the temperature change the viscosity of honey? And so straight away, you've got temperature and viscosity.

17:51
And so we talk about an independent variable, that is the thing that you're testing. And so it will be temperature. And so you're going to be changing the temperature, but keeping every other aspect of the experiment the same.

18:07
And then the dependent variable will be the viscosity. And so if you do that time after time after time, you can, you can test things like, does the tongue have a different framework for testing different flavours?

18:25
When I was in a younger high school, we did an experiment, the teacher told us what to expect, the book told us what to expect, and that we were told that the tongue had four zones, sweet, salty, bitter...

18:37
And because we were ingrained to think that, we, we did the test and we discovered that the tongue indeed had four zones. But in actual fact, that was rubbish.

18:48
And it's totally disproven, but it was passed from teacher to student to teacher to student because of the engrainment and not because of an unbiased experiment.

18:59
So really, you have to come to experiments with a bit of an unbiased mind and to actually approach it fairly. And so fairly, we shouldn't have been told up front what the zones of the tongue were.

19:11
We should have had a blindfold on and thought about how to control the different variables. And that's exactly what someone did.

19:19
And after 100 years of scientific rubbish, they actually showed the tongue was like, which is really what you'd expect normally anyway, like who would think the tongue would have four zones?

19:32
Now, now, of course, it's common sense, but common sense. Speaking of that, could you give us some examples in, in, again, drawing from your experience and your experiments that you did with kids, where you ask one of your students,

19:46
we're going to do this experiment, what do you think is going to happen? And pretty much everyone says, this is going to happen.

19:52
And then you do the experiment and something totally different happens, which means the results of the experiment don't actually meet our common sense expectations, which I'm asking this because it's very common these days, common these days,

20:07
to quickly make up our mind with no sufficient data and, and no actually need to investigate further. And I'm guessing, from your experience, how, how kids react to that discrepancy between what actually comes out of the experiment and what they expected.

20:28
And maybe that teaches them something about real life.

20:32
Yep. Um, so you, you've, you've asked the question I wasn't expecting. So while you're asking it, I'm thinking it quite, but thankfully I've come up with one.

20:43
I have two balloons. And if I blow up one

20:48
quite big. Now, normally I have the tube and

20:54
if I blow up the other one quite small. Normally I've got the tube between them with a valve that I can turn on and off. And I will show that to the children and I say when I open the valve.

21:06
What do you expect to happen, what's your prediction they're joined with a tube so the air can flow between them.

21:14
I've got a large one which is orange and a small one which is yellow and say Peter I'll ask you, what do you expect to happen. What's your prediction.

21:24
My common sense would tell me that the pressure will equalize between the two balloons and eventually that'd be the same size. Right. Yeah, yeah.

21:34
But then you're also saying he wouldn't be asking a common sense question, that is correct.

21:40
So, in actual fact I can tell the viewers that the small balloon will get smaller, and it will blow up the big balloon.

21:52
That is a little bit surprising until you think about it a little bit more for a little bit longer and that is when you blow up a balloon beforehand sometimes you stretch it to make it a little bit easier to blow up.

22:06
And so when you actually blow the balloon up like this the actual stretchiness of it is less. Whereas when it's only a little bit, there's quite a lot of stretchiness pushing.

22:18
So, that actually pushes the air into the big one which is already stretched. And so, that then gets kids to think about elasticity, the storage of energy, pressure, particles moving, kinetic particle theory, material science.

22:40
So, the world just opens up with such a simple little experiment. So, I'm dreading the day that they ban balloons because, you know, half of the scientific knowledge will disappear from the world.

22:56
Straws is one matter but balloons could be another problem. I guess I answered this way because I was thinking of what happens when you've got water into different containers that are connected with a small pipe in the bottom.

23:12
And there's only atmospheric pressure on pressing against the surface of both containers of water. And in every case they do equalize. So I thought: “Ah, I can take that experience and that knowledge and put it here in this situation and it'll work”.

23:29
But no, it doesn't, right? Different situations.

23:33
So yeah, question twice. Ask multiple questions. Even if something simple, the result may surprise you, which is what I really like about science, not everything is common sense, like, even at that level, like the micro level, things can surprise you.

23:48
That's why things are really good proxy for learning how to think. I don't think you can get so much with mathematics, with physics definitely.

23:57
But it's, I guess, physics, chemistry, are those places in chemistry, sorry, in science where you can really learn how the world works and it's not how you think.

24:10
Yeah, and look, one thing I had as a teacher, it's not here, but I'd have a bookcase full of equipment, lots of little, so that when you just mentioned the water equalizing, I'd have that piece of equipment and I could then show the children.

24:24
I'd often have things on hand, which would then, I could use as a student, ask the question, oh, let me, let's have a look, and that really accelerates your teaching.

24:37
So, sometimes when I did online classes, I'd have trays, you know, there'd be tuning forks and candles and straws and magnets and a kid would ask a question, I'd say, just a minute, just a minute, and I'd quickly, I'd say, oh, look at this, and then I could, you know, burn a piece of steel wool or something like this.

24:53
That's where real teaching comes in.

24:57
Online makes it very, it's a difficult thing to do online because your mind is just, you know, trying to keep track of the children, the experiments, and so online teaching I find very tiring, but you can do it well if you've got access to good equipment, that's for sure.

25:18
I guess what you just mentioned is a really good example of the value of the teacher because right now, like I do that myself, I record my lectures and put them online, I don't have live lectures.

25:31
But what you just said, where a student asks a question, you go to your equipment, you bring out what's necessary to do a experiment, ad hoc experiment, demonstrate to the student the effect of what they just said.

25:47
I think that's a value where a teacher can make a huge difference compared to what online teaching is about. I guess you do a lot of that, right? Most of your work is online, sorry, most of your work is live.

26:03
So not anymore. Me personally, I'm trying to scale, and the only way that I can scale is producing the video on demand. However, there's quite a lot of clients who do want the online

26:16
that I've just talked about. And so I'm setting up, I'm finding teachers who are like me and I'm supporting them with equipment and resources.

26:30
And so scaling it with other people doing it. I find I don't have the time.

26:35
The only time I do it now is when I'm developing new equipment and new steps. And then it's spectacular. Because rather than just developing an equipment and taking it to the market, I can test the equipment with 20 homeschool children.

26:53
And I can watch very, and you can see a lot. You can actually see, you can oversee those students online far better than a classroom. With a classroom, often the kids, their backs are too, you can't see what they're doing.

27:07
You have to walk around the room. When it's online, I can say, Whoa, stop, stop, Johnny, you're about to do this and that's going to cause an accident.

27:15
And I go, Oh, wow, let's all have a look at this experiment. And we can put that on the screen and say, Oh, do you notice this? Online has actually, I think it's actually accelerated the visual learning with equipment and so, and I've had quite a few discoveries

27:34
online. So for just a small example, I used to fill up my buns and burners holding them with the can here and the gas would go and a kid said, Oh, no, Jacob, you put, you put the buns and burner upside down in the table, I'm like,

27:48
Oh, of course you do. Just little things like that. And even some equipment, a kid goes, Oh, it broke. And I'm like, Wow, I have to get that fixed up. And so, and, you know, the very best thing about it, too, is that I sell the tickets to online and so I'm getting paid to develop my own products.

28:07
You get testing in the field. What other Tiny Labs are there? I know that you were working with some electrical or electronics kits.

28:19
This is definitely our flagship, which is a chemistry set.

28:24
I didn't actually bring much today.

28:27
I've got this wonderful electricity set, which is based on, everybody's probably seen it, it’s clip circuit. It's the it's a little clicky things. Very simple to set up, but it's made by toy companies.

28:41
They never actually got a science teacher involved. And so instead of including three light globes, they'd only put one light globe. And so you couldn't do series and parallel circuits.

28:50
There was no way to measure the currents in the voltages. So what I've simply done is I have put together a set with three light globes, alligator clips on clippies, an ammeter and a voltmeter, and it comes in a case like that.

29:06
They can even make a variable resistor. And the beauty is, to be honest, most science teachers hate electricity because the wires are everywhere. Sometimes the wires don't work.

29:16
They can't fix the students problems. But with the clip circuit, everything's so logical in the order, they can say, oh, here's the problem.

29:23
They screw the globe and it works. And it's just much easier. And you don't need to have a PowerPoint. And in actual fact, it's a lot cheaper.

29:33
In fact, our whole set is the same price as a normal power pack. And so teachers are really enjoying it. I've done a workbook. I've done the videos.

29:43
And so I normally say to the teachers, the first time around, if you've got no idea about electricity, let me be the teacher in the classroom with the video.

29:51
And then the following year, you'd be the teacher. You won't need me. I've trained you via the video. And then you'd be the teacher because nothing beats a real teacher.

30:02
I can tell you that. And a real teacher failing is even better, much better than the most successful YouTube success.

30:11
Kids don't go home saying, I saw an explosion on YouTube. They go home and say, I saw Mr. Strickling fail again today.

30:19
He lost his eyebrows again.

30:22
That's it.

30:24
Yeah. So do you?

30:26
That's the electricity. And then I'm doing a physics set. And look, this is a maker podcast.

30:37
And I am not a high end designer or anything like that. I'm very simple, very quick.

30:49
The best thing we ever bought, you might think, is a 3D printer, but it's actually a laser cutter.

30:54
I am a massive, massive advocate of laser cutters. I'll say that. I'll yell it out to the world. Laser cutting is just you can do so much more and so much quicker.

31:06
So we make all our foam mats. And we cut lots of seeder. We cut lots of cardboard.

31:14
So the table, is it made by your laser cutter?

31:18
So this table is, we actually, this is one thing that we get made in from overseas.

31:25
But the cement sheet, we actually, we discovered we could actually make, for a year I was using a circular saw and then a wet saw.

31:37
And then one of my workers accidentally dropped one of the... and it broke.

31:45
And we'd been marking them with the laser cutter. We'd just been marking them, scoring them.

31:50
But then he actually broke it and it broke.

31:53
We were like, we could actually score it and snap it. And so we went, these were taking maybe 15 minutes each to make, and it's down to like one minute.

32:02
The laser cutter sped up our process by 15 times.

32:05
So what do you make in that cutter out of all the bits and pieces that are in the kit?

32:12
So now with the cutter, we make the cement sheets. And in this particular set, we make the foam. With the electricity set, I make a few little cutouts,

32:26
but also make a solar powered car set. And the solar powered, it makes the chassis, it cuts the wheels out of foam.

32:35
We also make trays. I do a lot of engraving with it. So we engrave a lot of our products very quickly.

32:42
So there's a lot of, we use it for a lot of branding. And then we do use, we do do a fair bit of 3D printing.

32:51
But we get that normally done somewhere else. So for example, the thermometers we use, we just buy these in.

33:01
You can't sell that, right? It's illegal to sell it because the kids have got access to the batteries.

33:07
But we get these 3D printed. We pop these in there like that. And then all of a sudden you've got a very valuable marketable product,

33:17
which is now legal because it's difficult to get to the batteries and so on. And that fits nicely into our set.

33:24
So another story is I developed these for our set, discovered that these are fantastic for schools.

33:32
And so these are now one of our cash cows for schools because they're so much better than a glass thermometer

33:39
because you can hold the probe, you can see the temperature live. It's easy to see it much better than a thermometer.

33:46
So it's a little bit like the space program. There's been lots of spinoffs that are now good for schools.

33:53
Even like the little scales, which I use for our set, accurate to 0.01 grams.

33:59
We now sell them in packs of 8 for the same price as a normal scale.

34:05
And so I make the tray from recycled cedar wood. We put a foam inlay in and we sell them for 8.

34:11
We put the school's name on it. They all love it. And it's all very simple.

34:16
And it's because I got the biggest laser cutter that we could afford.

34:20
But we started with a small one. These foam trays were taking 30 minutes to cut with our first one.

34:29
And so long, long time. But then we just bought the biggest, most expensive, the biggest one we could fit.

34:35
And it's gone from 30 minutes down to 2 minutes. So again, a factor of 15.

34:42
Without much skills. And just very simple CAD skills, like the world's simplest CAD skills. Because I never go to genius level.

34:51
I always just go up. So what's good enough? And then move on to the next project.

34:56
So don't ask me too many deep, deep questions because I'm just, keep moving along.

35:02
No, that's impressive because what I also like is that basically, well, you are a teacher.

35:08
You wanted to fix a problem in education, but in the course of doing that, you actually built the business as well.

35:14
And of course, you had to come up and learn everything that's needed to run a business, not just to be a teacher,

35:21
which is just one level up from what a teacher would normally do.

35:25
Like that works at a school where you can focus on your education.

35:30
So congratulations for that as well, Jacob, because I do know that's not easy.

35:35
That's just as hard as being a pioneer in education or in any other field.

35:41
You need support. You need support. There's no doubt about it.

35:45
Don't try to be a self-made businessman. Try and get as much support as you can, which is what I did.

35:51
You got some really good solutions. Like for example, some of the equipment in the kit, like the little tiny files, for example,

35:58
you said, hey, I can buy that. I don't have to worry about designing it. And you just integrated that into your product.

36:05
It's really, I guess, out of the box thinking.

36:08
The more that you can get that's pre-designed. Like, for example, I'll give everyone, we paid an industrial designer to design this.

36:18
Now, this might look very, very simple. And when you see the final product, you say, that's so easy.

36:23
Of course that. But this was about $5,000 in design costs because what are you going to use to stop it slipping?

36:33
You know, these are O-rings. But now that you see it, it's obvious. How do you stop that from opening up like that?

36:42
How many ply, ply, what material are you going to use? How many ply? How strong does it have to be?

36:51
There's just, there's a thousand questions. And I guess my secret is you just make a, you just got to make decisions.

36:58
You just got to go bang, bang, bang. And then you can, I find that I change things later on.

37:05
That you just, you have to make a decision and you've got to go for it.

37:10
Otherwise you just will not come up with anything new if you just can't decide.

37:16
It's much better to make a mistake or 10 mistakes than not make anything. That's my philosophy. Just do it.

37:23
As long as, as long as it's not going to injure people, I guess that's the most important thing.

37:27
But if it's not going to cause harm, just do it.

37:30
There's no failed experiment, right? You learn from every single experiment. Science.

37:37
Great. Well, that's amazing, Jacob. Thank you. So just mindful of time.

37:42
We just hit the, about 40 minutes. So I guess to start concluding at this point, a couple of questions first.

37:53
You've had about three or four years under your belt right now. What's the next three or four going to look like for you?

38:02
Yep. So I've actually just filmed on a fairly major TV show. So we're filming this in June.

38:12
I can't say what the show is, but I can say it will probably go to air in August.

38:18
And I think my life is going to change dramatically because people are, we're unknown, you know, at the moment.

38:29
We will, we will become known. And so we are scaling up right now to get ready for when the show goes to air.

38:36
What that will also do is that will bring the, that will bring the competitors, which in my mind is fantastic because my equipment, this, this idea of shrinking, I think it should be a mentality taken on by more.

38:51
And our little old company won't be able to handle this. So competitors will come and I welcome them.

39:00
Just like with the electric car started with Tesla. There's now lots of competitors and it's good for everybody.

39:08
Someone has to start. You're the one.

39:11
We made the start. And so I can, I can hand to my heart, say that practical science is going to change in schools around the world as people shrink it and kids will have more engagement themselves.

39:27
And I'll be a part of that. I'll be a part of that. That's for sure.

39:33
Amazing. Very well done, Jacob. Is it, is it too presumptuous to ask which channel/channels should we be looking at or is it a bit early?

39:43
I think I'm allowed to say it’s Channel 10, but it is a very popular show. Don't you worry about that either.

39:53
I'm sure I’ll come across it. Everybody knows this show. It's to do with businesses and pitching.

40:00
I'm not going to say anymore. I think I know. I think I know what you're talking about.

40:04
All right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure it's going to go great.

40:10
There's so many people that actually resonate with what you're doing and what you're saying in your philosophy and it's not just teachers.

40:17
So I'm sure it's going to have an impact. So well done, Jacob. I knew it was going to happen.

40:24
Because I'm just thinking of my, my first impression of you two, two years ago was during the pandemic as well.

40:33
And it did make a huge impression and I thought, well, this is something that, you know, I'm very happy to come across and happy to know it's actually in my, in my neighborhood pretty much.

40:46
Both of us being in Sydney. So it was striking. So I think it's just a really good evolution and conclusion.

40:54
Oh, not conclusion, but no, at this point in time is how far you've gone. So it's excellent. Well done.

41:01
Now, last question. I'm not sure if you do want people to get in touch with you, but where can people find more information about you, your philosophy of teaching, your products as well?

41:15
I guess a website, social media, LinkedIn, location where people can find more about you.

41:23
Yeah, look, Tiny Science Lab is fairly straightforward. Type that in Google. You do a search like that.

41:29
You know, just the www.tinysciencelab.com.au There you will see the products. To see my overall philosophy.

41:38
Maybe I've written it down on some channel somewhere, but it's pretty quick to see that I'm just all about hands-on practical engagement without, without thinking too deep theoretical.

41:50
I let that come later on for the real teachers, I guess.

41:56
Awesome. Well, Jacob, it was a real pleasure talking to you today. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

42:04
Thank you for listening, everybody.

42:08
Bye for now and talk soon.

42:10
Okay. Bye bye, everybody.