It is perhaps best to think of schoolchildren as holding a liminal position with respect to science and the rest of society. They are not quite inside the scientific community or squarely outside it either. They are both science and "the public", and they are neither of these things, yet. Their lives could go in a range of directions.
Arguably, their occupying this midway position is why the Google Science Fair projects were so inventive. So what can we do to further this sort of liminality in grownup science? How can we extend the social spheres of our professional scientists, especially those who define the research agenda, so they might draw inspiration more effectively from the diversity of publics that fund them?
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