The Last Page

The Last Page

By Josh de Leeuw ’08

Playing—and Learning—in the Scientific “Sandbox” 

By Josh de Leeuw ’08 

For most people, the sandbox represents a slice of childhood memory, but for me it is where I became a scientist. I came to this realization when my Vassar mentor, Professor of Psychology Ken Livingston, gave this year’s spring convocation address and referred to the recently founded Interdisciplinary Robotics Research Lab as a “great new sandbox to play in.” This struck me as a profoundly accurate way to describe the laboratory in which I have spent the better part of the last five years—three as a student and, after graduation, two as the lab’s assistant director.

Any good sandbox has a few essential qualities. Most importantly, it needs to be a hands-on, and preferably messy, experience. If I were to choose one way to describe the experience of the undergraduate scientist at Vassar, it would be hands-on. A principal advantage of a campus without graduate students is that undergraduates get to do all the messy work that graduate students would usually handle at large research universities. I remember when one of my old high school friends visited the lab during my junior year and marveled at the fact that I was actually getting to work on a daily basis with robots and other equipment. At his well-known university, he wasn’t allowed anywhere near the equipment. Meanwhile, as a Vassar student, I had the opportunity to build robots (I’ve made at least 20 by now); write the software that is their brain; formulate hypotheses to test, gather, and analyze data; present my work at scientific meetings; and write papers that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. 

The second important quality of a sandbox is that it is a shared play space. If you want to build the biggest, coolest sandcastle, you’ll need other people to help you out—preferably people who know lots of things that you don’t. A collaborative, interdisciplinary lab environment is an ideal place for these kinds of interactions. I didn’t take a single biology class at Vassar, but I had the hands-on and definitely messy experiences of handling a six-kilogram torpedo ray, studying a litter of electric stingrays, and making molds and models of fish to build aquatic robots. I learned more while playing in the “sandbox” than I did in the classroom, and I think this is an experience that is shared by many of Vassar’s young scientists.

Finally, a sandbox is a forgiving play space. Sure, it’s easy to knock down a sandcastle, but it’s also easy to build it again and, most importantly, to improve it. A lab is full of people making mistakes all the time, which is possibly the best learning environment for turning students into scientists. When you make a mistake, you figure out what went wrong and what you learned from it. This is the heart of the scientific process, and this kind of experience can only be had in the hands-on, messy environment of the sandbox.

I’m writing this article as I get ready to leave Vassar for graduate school. My hope is that I find a new environment as playful as the one I am leaving, full of rich learning opportunities and messy experiences. I suspect, however, that as with the fond memory of a childhood playground, I will always have a favorite sandbox.

Josh de Leeuw ’08 is currently pursuing his PhD in cognitive science at Indiana University. He recently received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study artificial nervous systems in robots. A sandbox is an apt metaphor for the piece; Josh grew up building sandcastles with children at Vassar’s Wimpfheimer Nursery School—his mother, Julie Riess ’82, is director of the school. His father, Nicholas de Leeuw ’82, is a lecturer in psychology at the college.

Illustration by Chris Silverman; photo, Russell Monk