They plan multiday projects, often built around classic and popular stories like the Three Little Pigs, and take students step by step through the engineering process: design, build, test, evaluate.
“They have to have the thinking skills of an engineer to keep up with all the innovation that’s constantly coming into their world,” Ms. Morrow said.
First graders were recently challenged with helping a farmer keep rabbits out of his garden.
In teams of four, they brainstormed about building fences with difficult-to-scale ladders instead of doors and setting out food decoys for the rabbits. They drew up blueprints and then brought them to life with plastic plates, paper cups, straws and foam paper.
Then they planned to test their ideas with pop-up plastic rabbits. If the fences were breached, they would be asked to improve the design.
“It gets your brain going,” said Elizabeth Crowley, 7, who wants to be an engineer when she grows up. “And I actually learn something when I’m doing a project — like you can work together to do something you couldn’t do before.”
I’m hoping the Race to the Top program spurs more of this kind of thing.
This is a point that you’ve started to see resonating recently among both economics and science folks, Thomas Friedman is famous for it as well. Science illiteracy is the biggest threat to the future of this nation, because it is the science and technology innovation engine that has made us the economic power that we are. If we want to stay a great nation, we need to keep that engine running.
The video was recorded at this year’s world science festival in NYC. I’m really going to have to get down there next year.
While the magnets and why questions video tends to get more internet play, this one is short (4 minutes) and makes you realize something very important: plants don’t come from the ground, they are built out of the air.
News reports of the failed attempt to contain the oil-spewing equipment on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico have referred obliquely to things like “ice crystals” or an “icy slush” clogging the hardware that was intended to cap the leak. Anyone who is paying attention would recognize that there’s a bit of a problem here, in that, even at the temperatures and pressures of the ocean at the site, the water there is very much in its liquid phase, as are the hydrocarbons that are spewing through the leak. The methane that caused the original explosion remains gaseous down to -161°C. The “ice” that’s forming is actually a solidified mixture of methane and water called a clathrate. Clathrates have also been in the news because of a potential role in climate change, so it seems like an opportune time to explain what they are.
Ars Technica goes on to explain the chemistry of these Clathrates, and how they can exist at the bottom of the ocean.
And, on the subject of the oil breach, it’s a damn shame that it’s going to take the destruction of most of the marine industries in the Gulf, and large parts of the ecosystem, for people to realize off shore drilling, in both safety and trade offs, is a more complicated issue then “drill, baby, drill.”
This weekend I learned about JNI… that’s a blog post for another time. The net result is this:
Yes, it looks like the glory of Atari land graphics, but that’s not the important part. The important part is that it looks a lot like that last graph I posted. The net result is that I’ve got the data being generated in an android environment.
With the loss of Pluto, the number of major planets in our solar system has dropped to eight. If the current trend continues, then come April 13, 3703 the solar system will no longer have any major planets. My analysis suggests several possible causes, for the loss of major planets….
The moto of the Improbably Research Journal is: First it makes you laugh, then it makes you think.
The “makes you think” part here is realizing there was nothing sacred about the number 9 when it came to planets. The number of planets has gone up and down in the past many times as we’ve learned more about our solar system. This was well put by Darren Bennett’s Census of the Solar System last year in 365 Days of Astronomy.
I’m still more of a fan of the “enough gravity to make it round” view of planets, which give us dozens (possibly hundreds) of new planets, including turning the major moons of the gas giants into planets. We’d need one hell of a mnemonic to keep track of them all, but I think even the current definition of planets is going to become problematic when we get more data on extra solar planets. For those wondering, that number is currently 453 and growing.
Statistics is hard. But that’s not just an issue of individual understanding; it’s also becoming one of the nation’s biggest political problems. We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to arguments over what the data mean. If you don’t understand statistics, you don’t know what’s going on — and you can’t tell when you’re being lied to. Statistics should now be a core part of general education. You shouldn’t finish high school without understanding it reasonably well — as well, say, as you can compose an essay.
It goes on to explain a whole number of policy issues that are being argued with badly understood data.
You can see it in the dust up over climate change or vaccines, most people just don’t understand what science is, how it works, and how it’s different from anecdotal evidence. This translates to some very real world policy issues.
But to many of the college’s faculty, and to Leon Botstein, who has been the college’s president since 1975, there was still something missing: a true introduction to science and scientific thinking for the vast majority of Bard’s students. “People who graduate in fields other than science often do not understand science,” he says. “They do not know what the limits of science are and what science can do. It’s catastrophic.”
Next January, Bard’s science and math faculty – along with postdoctoral students and faculty from other institutions — will try to change all that with the Citizen Science Program, three weeks of science learning modeled on the success of Language and Thinking. Also required of all 500 of the college’s freshmen, and ungraded, Botstein hopes it will become similarly entrenched as a landmark of students’ first year at Bard.
This is going to be 3 weeks of quite intensive education. From the curriculum:
This program will merge three distinct, yet thematically interwoven week-long rotations, each designed to address the overarching question How can we reduce the global burden
of infectious disease? In one rotation, you will focus on the concept of laboratory experimentation by exploring the question How can infections be treated? This rotation will be spent in the laboratories of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. You will get hands-on experience exploring how antibiotic resistance develops in bacterial strains and how DNA is moved from bacterium to bacterium (similar to how antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus aureus produced the “MRSA” strains so often reported in the news).
The second rotation will focus on the question What factor best explains a person’s probability of exposure to disease? The disease we will study is tuberculosis. You will look at a number of factors, including the science of Mycobacterium (the organism that causes tuberculosis), risk factors that can cause a tuberculosis infection to become worse (including HIV infection), and global locations where the tuberculosis burden is heavy and light. We will discuss what can be done to alter the number of infectious cases within these different environments.
The third rotation will focus on the spread of infection by exploring the question What intervention—such as vaccination, treatment, reduced exposure—is the most effective at reducing transmission of an infection? You will learn to use state-of-the-art computer simulations to help you understand and observe how an infectious disease can spread throughout a community, and how different treatment options can be effective in limiting disease.
I especially appreciate their focus on a real world problem, then using science to explore facets on how to address it. It’s an inspired approach, and I wish them the best of luck in implementing it.
Flights are still grounded in Europe due to the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, echoing back to the 3 days of air space closure in the United States after September 11, 2001. But unlike that event, relaunching the planes isn’t a matter of adding locks to airplane doors, or hiring thousands of unskilled workers to make you take your shoes off before getting on planes. Instead, we just have to wait for the ash to clear, and hope that the volcano doesn’t erupt again.
The last time this volcano was active was in 1821, and it continued to have on and off again eruptions for 2 years. Just think of that for a minute: what would a world be like where Europe was a no fly zone for a year?
