With work like this, who needs play?

Children are natural scientists. In fact, says Sanjida O'Connell, it requires scarcely any 'teaching' to put their native curiosity to good educational use

Science has never been as important to our lives as it is now. Today's world is dominated by mobile phones, laptops, palmtops and devices that let your fridge tell the supermarket you're low on marge. We can fax, wap, text, e-mail, and cyber-chat.

Even if we're reluctant to join the global village, we might want to decide whether we should have clones or pollution-free transport, or whether we should grow replacement hearts, live on Mars or live longer. "In order to engage in the debate about what's happening in society, we need to be scientifically literate," says Professor Susan Greenfield, a neurologist at Oxford University.

According to Dr David Moore, the chief executive of the Association for Science Education, all children are born scientists. Science is an articulation of their natural curiosity and, he says, we need to encourage that curiosity.

Children begin to learn about science at school when they are five. At that stage, science isn't split up into its core subjects of chemistry, biology and physics. Research shows that children are enthusiastic about science at this point of their schooling but that, from GCSEs to university level, they lose interest.

"We haven't been good enough at showing them that science is a good career move," says Dr Moore. "To many children, a career in science is not as obvious as being a TV presenter."

So what is the best way of retaining and building on children's natural curiosity? When Adam Hart-Davis's son was small, he used to point to the family cat and ask, "Why is it a cat?" and "What would happen if it wasn't a cat?" Children can drive parents dotty with questions, says Dr Hart-Davis, who trained in chemistry before becoming an inventor and television presenter. "But eventually children will start asking sensible questions and the primary reason why some people are good at science is because they ask the right questions."

This summer, it's highly likely that many children will have been driving their parents dotty. The experiments and projects on these pages are designed to be a fun and refreshing take on science, and all can be done easily at home.

According to the experts, the best way to inspire children is to try to answer their questions. "The important thing is to get youngsters talking to parents," says Dr Moore. "It doesn't matter if you don't know all the answers. After all, science doesn't know all the answers; science is a voyage of discovery."

One good way to find out the answer, or to have a debate about what the answer might be, is to go to a science centre. Science museums present better opportunities for learning, more so than schools, says Professor Alison Gopnik, a child psychologist based at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Gopnik's research has shown that children are capable of understanding the way the world works at a much earlier age than many scientists believe. "At science museums, you don't have to do much but stand around and talk to your child," she says. "You don't even have to know the answer – just the process of inquiry is useful."

According to Bill Clarke, the education officer for the Natural History Museum, if children leave the building after a few hours thinking, "Wow, natural history is amazing", then that is more important to learning than cognitive tasks such as the understanding of plate tectonics.

It is important to encourage both girls and boys in science, although the real divide between the sexes does not usually appear until the onset of adolescence. Encouragingly, research has found both boys and girls rate themselves as being equally good at science at the primary-school level. Unfortunately, only 15 per cent of the children surveyed in a Cambridge University study thought they would have a career in science.

In an attempt to change this tendency, the Natural History Museum is introducing its scientists to groups of children. Clarke says that as well as helping to explain what scientists do, it also shows that "they have a sense of humour, they support Sunderland, they've got a pet dog – basically that you can be a normal human being and a scientist."

One project for the summer might be to ask your child to give you a list of questions they want to know the answer to, and then spend the holiday answering them – although you may end up a volcano-and-dinosaur expert. The experiments below are designed to be done by parents with children. All the experiments relate back to the national curriculum, principally Key Stages one to three.

"Parents could try to show that science is exciting," says Dr Moore. "Science experiments done at home shouldn't be restricted to the curriculum."

All of the experiments can lead on to other areas of exploration and discussion, and none of them should be treated as homework. They're all intended to be good fun for adults and children.