For years science class in Japan has been hands-on: students discover the laws of nature through tabletop experiments and not by reading a textbook. This improves the chances that they’ll remember the lesson–as Mom said, you remember the meaning of a word if you look it up yourself but not if she tells you–and also nurtures inquiry and understanding of the scientific method. Or so it would appear at Yotsuya No. 6 Elementary School in Tokyo. As thirty 10-year-olds take their seats, teacher Zenjiro Baba holds up a hand-lettered sign that the class reads in perfect sing-song unison: guess the weight of a half dozen everyday objects, weigh them and compare your guesses to the data. End of Japanese-asautomatons stereotype. From then on the room is bedlam. Kids squirm, punch, scribble as they work in pairs, guessing the weight of pencils, mirrors, compasses, and then moving teeny weights on and off a balance. No one cracks a textbook. No child is a mere observer. No child takes notes. The lesson goes from fingertips to brain.

Now Japan is going beyond hands-on. It’s called technology-based science: learning the applications of science before the abstruse principles. Concepts–Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, for instance-are fine for international science tests, but they don’t help kids fix the toaster or, more to the point, invent a better one. The ministry’s answer: bring the toaster to school. Fourth graders will bring in small appliances and try to repair them, along the way learning the basics of electricity, circuitry and motors. Ten-year-olds will take solar batteries and model cars and try to develop sun-powered toys. That may give them the ingenuity to, one day, create a real solar car. Along the way they will up the laws of optics and photovoltaics, subjects that seem a lot more interesting they mean the difference between a toy Cressida zipping around a sundrenched sidewalk and a dud sputtering nowhere fast.

Will the United States learn anything from Japan’s science-education revision? Here, hands-on gets a great deal of lip service but patchy implementation. With nothing akin to Japan’s Ministry of Education, which dictates everything from curricula to the emphasis on rote memorization in math, history and language, it is difficult to see what more can be done to convince schools to toss the textbooks and grab the microscope. The technology-first approach-learning about acid rain before the principles of acids and bases, and genetic counseling before Mendel’s laws of inheritance–is less established, says proponent Rustum Roy, a professor of materials science at Pennsylvania State University. Teachers still keep the reasons for learning science in reserve, like a punch line to be delivered in June: “By the way, those polysyllabic chemical names you memorized for nine months tell you whether your tap water’s poisoned. " Students remember and care about that which is connected to life, Roy argues. Japan is about to grab this idea and run with it. If it works, the next generation won’t need Americans to come up with the ideas at all.