Nobel laureate Hideki Shirakawa suggested Friday that elementary school children in Japan more firsthand experience in their science education.

Asked for advice on the issue, the 64-year-old professor emeritus at Tsukuba University replied: "Take pupils to the field, into nature."

Shirakawa won the 2000 Nobel Prize for chemistry on Oct. 10, together with American physicist Alan J. Heeger and chemist Alan G. MacDiarmid, for their discovery in the 1970s that plastics could be made to conduct electricity.