Why Hands-On Science Matters
I am an extensive researcher. I have a library of garden books. I have been using internet Google searches since the early nineties to help me with my professional research and continue to use all tools I possibly can today. The last decade has continually shifted the use of technology. The next decade, with artificial intelligence and large language models becoming the standard and the norm for research, will continue to change things—nothing more than in the fields of math and sciences.
As a horticulturalist, I use artificial intelligence for research to quickly gather information for me to look at and discern, and for it to take my oftentimes extensive voice memos and sort through them. It is a great organizer for my work. And while doing my research for a hands-on garden classroom for schools, I have seen exactly why these hands-on classrooms are so important.
Part of the classroom curriculum is a hands-on garden inspired by the idea that most kindergartners throughout the last few decades—and maybe even still today—read The Very Hungry Caterpillar. So having a garden that is both foundationally strong in horticulture and sciences, but also at the same time offering the whimsy of that book, was a great place for me to start with curriculum.
The monarch butterfly has seen its populations decline dramatically over the last 40 years, to record lows over the last decade. The monarchs have this amazing story where they all migrate south to Mexico, to the Oyamel region, to a cloud forest made up of a tree called Abies religiosa. There was a scientific expedition that followed some of this migration research that says that population was discovered in 1975 in the cloud forest of Oyamel.
However, we have historical accounts that predate 1975, even here in North America, of people recounting that the skies were covered in butterflies, that the sun was darkened because there were so many, and that even the trees here in North America would at times be covered in the wings of monarch butterflies. For example, in 1857, W. S. M. d’Urban described monarchs in the Mississippi Valley “in such vast numbers as to darken the air by the clouds of them.” In September 1867, J. A. Allen observed roosts in southwestern Iowa “in such vast numbers… as almost to hide the foliage, and give to the trees their own peculiar color.”
Because of a lack of hands-on science in that region—or hands-on science by professionals gathering oral histories of the peoples of that region of Oyamel, Mexico—modern science and searching would have you believe that that cloud forest just popped out of nowhere in 1975. Despite that, we know it is not true. In January 1975, Kenneth C. Brugger and Catalina Trail (Aguado) located one of the overwintering sites in the mountains of Michoacán (for example, Cerro Pelón), and in August 1976 Fred A. Urquhart wrote of seeing “Butterflies—millions upon millions of monarch butterflies! They clung in tightly packed masses to every branch and trunk of the tall, gray-green oyamel trees,” a description that confirms what local communities had known for generations.
Of course, when the only answer became “1975,” that activated me as the human researcher. Now I have reached out to numerous experts and community leaders in that region of Mexico to see if they have oral or community records about the monarch butterflies being in the Oyamel forest pre-1975. This is direct evidence that even in the future, where AI will be of great assistance and has reduced research-aid hours—just in this particular conversation, by 11 or 12 hours of what I would typically assign to a keyboard-and-mouse research assistant as a professor—we still need the human mind. We still need a person to see the gap in the knowledge of science and to go into action, to connect with other humans who might be doing the same.
The lack of hands-on awareness of space, basic cognitive function skills, science observation, and notation means that a current Google search, or a current AI in fact, will only be able to find evidence to support that the cloud forest covered in monarch butterflies started in 1975. While doing research for the school garden is how I found this out: as I used OpenAI’s latest program, it could only discover that monarch butterflies in the cloud forest of Oyamel, Mexico were discovered in 1975. Because of the lack of documented, noted science, we have lost a part of the human story, a part of human science, a part of human anthropology.
That is exactly why teaching young people today to have hands-on experiences outside of a screen, outside of a search, outside of the aid of artificial intelligence is still so valuable and crucial. As our students and young people become more accustomed to leaning and having reliance on artificial intelligence, the simple observation of something in nature could lose science, anthropology, and the human story.
Notes & Attributions
• Historical quotes (North America):
• W. S. M. d’Urban, 1857 — “such vast numbers as to darken the air by the clouds of them.”
• J. A. Allen, September 1867 (pub. 1869) — “in such vast numbers… as almost to hide the foliage, and give to the trees their own peculiar color.”
• Mexican overwintering discovery (published accounts):
• Kenneth C. Brugger & Catalina Trail (Aguado) — first site located January 1975 (Michoacán; e.g., Cerro Pelón).
• Fred A. Urquhart, National Geographic, August 1976 — “Butterflies—millions upon millions… every branch and trunk of the tall, gray-green oyamel trees.”
• Model notation (this conversation): GPT-5 Thinking.
• Estimated human research time saved in this conversation: approximately 11–12 hours versus a basic keyboard-and-mouse research assistant, owing to rapid quote retrieval, drafting, bilingual outreach emails, and search-strategy synthesis.