What can Leonardo da Vinci teach us about our world today?

How time travel to the past can teach us a thing or two about today--and inspire us to create a better tomorrow

After reading Kimberly Warner’s recent post “In defense of bitter,” she and I have been conversing in Notes about her masterful interweaving of concepts to immerse readers in sensations as varied as grapes growing wild, word origins, the science of taste, biology, the Buddha, Chinese medicine, the smell of rain, and releasing memory.

I suggested a term for her process of connecting many facets of a thing (in this case, the word “bitter”) to bring us into her worldview: phenomenon-based learning.

We taste, with her, the slightly acidic grapes she finds on a hike along the Oregon Trail. She summons for us the musty fragrance (petrichor) that rain brings to parched earth. We dive into the Indo-European etymology of “bitter”, to see that it comes from an Indo-European root, “to split” as in splitting the senses away from sweetness to its not-so-sweet aftertaste. She takes us into the kitchen to see how bitter balances a dish and, explaining how, in the practice of Chinese (and, I would add from personal practice, Vedic) medicine, bitter might be used to bring the body back into balance.

And then, she shocks our sense of balance by showing the feelings of bitterness raised by that sensation, like '“the mother dog biting off her pup’s umbilical cord” and how “family secrets masking truths of identity.”

Her essay is a tour de force exploration building the World According to Bitter: geography, biology, medicine, taste, linguistics, religion, philosophy, with layers of her own personal World of Bitter According to Kimberly, shedding a layer, unmasking, baring heart- and-mind to reveal her own life’s experiences in defense of balance.

In defense of the bittersweet.

One bite of a grape—one “thing”—releases memories of all that.

World-building, thing by thing

That kind of world-building harkens a learning modality I’d stumbled on as I was researching my Edge of Yesterday YA book series, phenomenon-based learning. It centers on a practice of studying a topic, s “thing” from a 360-degree view.

As a science fiction writer and arm-chair time traveler, I began to apply some of the techniques suggested by phenomenon-based learning in world-building for the series. To bring 15th-century Florence, and the world of Renaissance to life for my readers meant immersing myself fully in the sights, sounds, smells, and people—then and now.

In the story, a teen STEMinista, Charley, has big dreams: she’s a modern-day Renaissance-girl wannabe. In a world where specialization is rewarded, Charley wants to do everything.

She loves all things STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and STEAM (adding in the arts). She also loves to tinker, invent, debate, compete on the soccer field, and emulate her professional-violinist mom—I think you get the picture.

She’s also determined to win the middle school science fair by inventing what she decides is Leonardo da Vinci’s design for a time machine. And she’s just the girl to make it happen.

But Charley’s dreams and ambitions are tamped down by her parents and teachers. When she presents her project to the class, everyone—friend and frenemy alike— shouts her down.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, by studying Leo’s designs, and using 21st-century science, engineering and technology, Charley decides time travel is possible. And, she speculates, a visit to fifteenth century Florence to meet Leonardo up-close-and-personal, might be just the ticket.

Her goal: to unlock the secrets of the Maestro’s amazing ability to “do it all.”

I had questions: What was it like to live in a world being re-born out of medieval times into new heights of knowledge, artistry and invention?

What would it take for a fifteenth-century, curious, illegitimate son of a Florentine lawyer with mega-drawing skills to dream up a glider? A helicopter? A scuba-diving suit? A tank? A bicycle? And how would he prove his mechanics might work?

How could I make my protagonist’s time machine invention plausible from both a scientific and engineering perspective?

What would it be like for a 21st-century teen to experience a world without running water or electricity? How would she adapt to being in a lo-tech landscape where her own devices, and knowledge of a far future with self-driving cars, AI and her hand-held “magic slate” might get her burned at the stake?

I was inspired to take Charley where no selfie-respecting teen had gone before. Since I write for—and about—GenZ teens, to keep it real, I wanted to talk to teens about their life experiences irl. What are they curious about? How do they view the world?

I needed beta readers. So, I created EOY Media, with an interactive learning through story online platform, to be able to offer workshops and programs for young people to dive deeper into STEAM and storytelling.

In these programs, I teach high school and college students a form of narrative nonfiction storytelling, and invite them to create stories online that take Charley’s adventures out into the world.

We begin our time travels with this prompt:

If you could go anywhere. . .any when. . .where would you go, who would you want to meet, and what would you want to do? 

The caveat: they had to show, in their stories, what they thought and felt about the pieces of the past that fascinated, inspired, amused or repelled them, and they must look at it from multiple viewpoints—like combining science and math, or history and technology and philosophy, or quantum theory and music. It’s a way to connect topics that are often stovepiped in our highly specialized and segmented society.

As an aside, over the years, I’ve gotten some pretty creative responses: back to dinosaur days; to 1940 to steal atomic weapons plans from Los Alamos; even forward to see what their own future might hold in store. One high school senior told me that, because he looks just like his dad did at his age, he wanted to turn up at his parents’ wedding in the 1990s, (he was born in 2005) to see the resulting mayhem.

On a more serious note, the results of our time-traveling together have turned into a world wide web of online, interactive stories, images and videos for other students¹ with a picture of the past and a way to connect to the present—and inspire ideas for the future.

Learning like Leonardo

All this world-building has been designed around popping the adventures of Charley and her friends off the page and into the real world.

In the process of looking at history through the eyes of a modern teen protagonist, a peer, we’ve come up with lots of “things” to look at:

• The world of Renaissance artistry-science-mathematics-invention-leadership of Leonardo, Brunelleschi, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Isabella d’Este starting at the Edge of Yesterday.

In the Renaissance, the phenomenon-based approach, learning like Leonardo looked like this:

• The eighteenth-century French Enlightenment with Voltaire and Emilie, the Marquise du Châtelet, and Marie Antoinette’s portraitist, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Three centuries later, the more-sophisticated worldview of the author and satirist Voltaire, perched on the edge of yesterday, comes to look more like this:

• The Roaring Twenties and the Harlem Renaissance, epitomized by the singular anthropologist, author, and playwright, Zora Neale Hurston, and her one-time friend, poet Langston Hughes.

A century ago, Zora was attempting to alchemize Western modernity together with the ancient folkways in her evolving worldview like this:

We’ve found, by creating a 360-degree worldview with stories by-and-about teens to connect past and present, we can offer something of a roadmap for readers. Seeing the past and filling in the puzzle pieces helps them make sense out of things, people, events they experience in their world when they find out how we got here. And teens who are seeking to carve out their identities and and find their place in the world, are able to create their own connections in telling their stories—and reading the stories of others.

                                          Advice to Teens at the Edge of Yesterday
                                          Follow your dreams; pursue your passions. 
                                          Listen to your heart; trust your intuition. 
                                          Apply reason: design, test, review, revise.
                                          Envision--and build--a better tomorrow.

Which brings things around to the personal. We encourage writers to explore the social and emotional parts of the story, “things” like courage, kindness, curiosity, creativity, perspective-taking, empathy, and ethics that are vital tools in developing the teamwork and collaboration skills they will need to thrive.

Here’s the “thing” of it: life is multifaceted. Everything. . .every one. . .is connected.

This is MASTERY.

Storytelling MASTERY

What can people, polymaths as different as Leonardo da Vinci, Emilie du Châtelet, Voltaire, and Zora Neale Hurston, living in far different times, teach us about the value of curiosity, creativity, courage, and character?

And how might MASTERY for teens today translate in our twenty-first century world?

By studying their lives-and-times, young people get a chance to grapple with phenomena, people and places far outside their direct experience and see how, with persistence, they were able to bring about something new. With luck, I believe this might help them examine the world they’ve been born into, to grapple with disparate and challenging ideas and, I hope, to push a new and better way forward.

Time is not a straight line. “Things” have gotten far more complex. Like looking at a Georges Seurat painting too close, it won’t make sense.

We can only get the big picture when we step back to connect the dots.

Today, at the Edge of Yesterday, MASTERY has taken a quantum leap forward to match our vastly more complex and interconnected times. This model blends a growth mindset, with knowledge and skills in arts and humanities, technology, emotional intelligence, reflection and youth. In partnership with nonprofit organizations, schools, libraries and universities, we have pivoted from that straight-line approach to seed new ways of learning that reflect our close interconnections to all “things”².

To make sense of “things,” the Renaissance-genius-wannabe of today will be able to combine and define algorithms that even a mind like Leonardo’s couldn’t dream up.

Especially challenging in our post-COVID world, this generation must master emotional intelligence to forge social connection. It is only through teamwork that we will be able to tackle the massive challenges our world faces.

And as we consider the evolution of artificial intelligence—will it be a tool for empowering us in our humanity, or for stripping away our human powers of MASTERY?

Time travelers ahead

Having soaked in lessons from the masters at the Edge of Yesterday, it has been my goal in working with these teens to help spark their curiosity. To encourage them to explore how they might view their own experiences through the lens of the past. And to challenge them to invent a better future.

Is it possible? When I present about MASTERY to high school and college students today, the challenges can feel daunting. Problem solving together, sharing our stories, these are connections to ease the way.

Connecting “things” to each other in a holistic way may help spur inspiration, unlock new ways of seeing and being that can free us to solve problems and, together, create a new and better way forward.

What does that 360-degree view look like to you?

I’m curious to hear from readers:

If you could go anywhere. . .any when. . .where would you go, who would you want to meet, and what would you want to do?

Hope you’ll share in the comments below.

1. Visit the time travelers section of the Edge of Yesterday interactive “learning through story” platform to sample the stories contributed by our EOY Story Advisors: https://edgeofyesterday.com/time-travelers

2. For an inside look at some of EOY’s STEM and STEAM programs and workshops, visit https://www.edgeofyesterday.com/blog/category/stem-learning/ and for more about our ongoing partnership with Columbia University’s pre-college Youth in STEM program, check out https://sps.columbia.edu/news/mentorship-forged-through-columbia-girls-stem-initiative-lasts-well-beyond-week-summer