About

The Science Notebook Project is an initiative by the Swiss science jouranlist and bestselling children non-fiction author Atlant Bieri. It aims to encourage children, teenagers, and adults to take a notebook and a pen and to go outside and observe the world around them and make notes and drawings about it. The notebook is an important tool of scientists to document their research. Likewise, it can be a great and thrilling tool for school children of all degrees and their parents to discover nature, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, maths, and technology. It allows them to ask questions, to make hypotheses, to design experiments, and to make notes of results, and also show these results to others. Like this a scientific cycle of knowledge is established where things are discovered, discussed, and shared.

The notebook was and is the primary tool to gather new knowledge. Alexander von Humboldt used it while he was on his journey to the Amazon rainforest. Charles Darwin used it during his trip around the world in the HMS Beagle. Alfred Russel Wallace used it on his journeys to Southeast Asia. They recorded what they saw, measured, assumed, and wrote down their daily sorrows and joys. They made drawings of new species, of landscapes, of mountains, and of rivers. They drew their new scientific concepts, made diagrams, or trees of life, or visualised new ideas about biogeography.

It was their way of learning, their way of understanding the world: through a piece of paper and a fountain pen. What they produced with this is new knowledge – the knowledge on which today’s world is based on.

Paper and pen are not a privilege to great scientists. They can be used by anybody who aims to discover the world. A blank piece of paper is a ticket to the wonders of the universe, to the secrets of the pond, and the hidden worlds beneath our feet. This is learning at its best – learning for life.

A drawing in the notebook of Alfred Russel Wallace.

Drawing of a leaf in the notebook of Alexander von Humboldt.

A page of Leonardo Da Vinci's "Codex Leicester"