“How do you raise a scientist in the Xbox age?”

That question headlined an op-ed that caught my eye in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. The compelling essay by Robert Scherrer, chairman of the physics department at Vanderbilt, echoes a number of points I highlighted a year ago in a post about the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

This week’s piece goes to the heart of a challenge that we at ExxonMobil believe the United States is beginning to face: Namely, will there be enough men and women with the science, technology, engineering, and math skills – i.e. the STEM competencies – to maintain future U.S. economic competitiveness?

Dr. Scherrer notes that his life-long interest in science was piqued as a 12-year-old fiddling with an old-fashioned chemistry set.

But the chemistry sets Dr. Scherrer grew up with are practically extinct now, largely for safety and liability reasons.

That’s good and bad – good because children aren’t maiming or blowing themselves up by mixing the wrong materials. But bad because that early exposure to the world of chemistry was so clearly an avenue into the sciences for generations of kids – an avenue now closed off.

Dr. Scherrer identifies simple tinkering – whether with a chemistry set or by taking apart and examining an appliance or piece of electronics – as instrumental in firing the imagination of would-be scientists. He writes:

The ability to tinker, to take things apart and understand how they function, is one of the key traits of a scientist. It’s no accident that an unusually large number of 20th-century American scientists grew up on farms or ranches, where they had to learn to fix the tractors and planters without outside help. Now most of us don’t even change our own oil.

Another factor he cited was boredom. With regimented schedules, activity-packed summers, and the lure of video games, today’s kids are never sufficiently bored enough to have to come up with novel ways to occupy their time:

When I was growing up, summer was devoid of organized activities. We were released into the suburban wilderness at the end of May and left to our own devices until our parents gathered us up for school in the fall. So what did we do during those endless, empty summer days? We daydreamed, explored our neighborhood and invented games. Daydreaming, exploration and invention happen to be the core of what scientists do. That is largely what I still do for a living.

He asks, “How can we expect junior scientists to daydream, when they can be playing computer games instead?”

An excellent question. Dr. Scherrer proposes giving your young children an old windup alarm clock and a screwdriver. Let them take it apart and see what makes it tick.

Dr. Scherrer has written an intriguing essay, one well worth taking a few minutes to read.