Thinking about STEM

Usually I think about STEAM rather than STEM (include Art), or general geeky stuff like Consumer and Education: 4 Robots That Engage Students in STEM | Robotics Trends, but here I'm just thinking about a specific example. Consider the video of an exploding whale and consequent discussion on Wired Magazine at What’s the Pressure Inside an Exploding Whale?

A whale is a really nice, contained package with a big, big layer of blubber around it that’s designed to keep everything in and keep water out while it’s diving. So they actually make fairly good balloons [..]

And, like most mammals, when they die and they aren’t scavenged—-or they’re too big to be effectively scavenged—-their viscera begins to decompose, whatever contents were in their stomach. That produces methane and hydrogen sulphide and a couple other gases, which are going to begin expanding, especially if it’s sitting in the sun for a couple of weeks.

Eventually, they can explode.

So let’s make a rough, back-of-the-envelope style of calculation, to estimate the pressure inside a bloated beached whale that’s about to explode. The idea is to get a ballpark estimate, that’s within an order of magnitude of the actual result.

Why, you may ask? Because SCIENCE. That’s why.

Here’s the game plan. I’m going to open up the above video in the handy physics video analysis software Tracker....

Now, imagine your ideal high school science curriculum. Does it include this? If not, why not?

Schools, Teens, Sleep, Research, Politics

One of the more important/interesting educator's blogs is Larry Cuban's; usually it's about research, or about his career as teacher and superintendent. Recently, though, he blogged on the way that research takes a subordinate (but still essential?) role in the school-district political process, using the story of "17-year-old Jilly Dos Santos" as the center. BTW, I hope everybody knows that we could (with pretty high confidence) improve high school learning outcomes by starting the day later. If not, read the links. And we don't do that because...well, mostly because it's not convenient. Cuban's point is about research within politics....he doesn't go all that far, but it's something to think of. Often.

Politics, Research, and School Reform: Letting Teens Sleep in

Santos created a Facebook page and Twitter account telling hundreds of fellow  students that the school board was going to start school at 7:20 AM. She contacted a non-profit group about sleep that gave her the scientific studies about how teenagers needed more, not less, sleep. She emailed all teachers in the district and started an online petition. She brought other students together and they made posters. She tweeted everyone that “If you are going to be attending the board meeting tomorrow we recommend you dress up.”

You guessed it. The school board turned down the earlier start time. A few months later, the coalition that Santos had pulled together worked successfully to get the school board to start high school at 9 AM. The superintendent said after the board voted 6-1 in favor of the later time: “Jilly kicked it over the edge for us.”

Who said that schools are apolitical institutions?...

Without the political muscle of the coalition Santos and others mobilized, ho-hum responses from the school board would have occurred.

Well, maybe nobody said schools are apolitical institutions.

(And if so, nobody was wrong. At least about that.)

Standard Schooling v. Human Diversity

Psychology professor and "quantified self" proponent Seth Roberts says of Occupational Specialization as Far Back as the Bronze Age that

The more you see the centrality of occupational specialization to human nature, the more you will see how modern schooling malnourishes almost everyone who undergoes it — which is almost everyone. Human nature takes people at one place and time — such as Mycenaean Greece — and pushes them to become adults who do all sorts of different things (woodcutter, herald, beekeeper . . . ). It takes people who start off the same or almost the same — same place, same food, same weather, similar genes — and creates diversity among them.

Modern education tries to do the opposite: Take a diverse set of students and make them the same. One example is No Child Left Behind. Another is that in almost every college class, all students are given the same material, the same assignments, and graded on the same one-dimensional scale. We don’t need everyone to be the same; in fact, we need exactly the opposite. The more diverse we are, the sooner we will find solutions to pressing problems, because they will be attacked in many different ways.

He has written occasionally about educational methods at the university level, and of course as a champion of self-experimentation he's focused on results that vary from one individual to the next. It happens to be Father's Day; if I were a father (rather than grandfather) of young children now, I do believe I'd start a notebook for each, each notebook titled What Works For Me And How I Know It, with a major section on How I Learn Best and How I Learned That It's True, with subsections about...well, never mind.

Or then again, maybe not.

Augmented Reality & Education

The Most Powerful App for Education

Bill Shribman is a photographer and a Senior Executive Producer at WGBH Public Television where he and his team create websites, games and apps for popular kids shows such as Arthur, Martha Speaks and Curious George. .... Take a tour of gesture-based games, augmented reality apps, and an app that helps kids with autism infer emotions through photos, and you may agree with Shribman that the most powerful app for education may be the camera.

The station is WGBH-TV and they blog their apps at Apps | WGBH Kids Interactive Group; I don't know that I'd say that the app is the camera, but I would say that apps using cameras (and today's tilt/acceleration/location/etc sensors along with tomorrow's everything-we-know-how-to-sense sensors) can become part of reality in a way that apps stuck with pre-defined data never could have done, and not only for the smaller kids.


Or then again, maybe not.

On Learning to Think

I wonder if it's possible for an educational system to encourage actual thought (systematically). I'm thinking about partisanship, here; the way that so many members of a group interpret whatever they see in terms of, well, Who Represents?

most people can't even remember the idiotic things said by people they identify with. Liberals can instantly call to mind this infamous exchange between a Fox News host and Bill Nye, the science guy, about global warming and volcanoes. But how many of them remember the CNN host who asked whether the Russian meteorite had been caused by global warming? Conservatives, meanwhile, all know about the global warming meteorite, but have a much less encyclopedic command of stupid utterances by conservative types.
It isn't, I think, that they don't encounter these stupidities; in fact, whenever one of these stories goes viral, the folks who share a party ID with the speaker generally spend a couple of days getting mad at the other side for blowing this up all out of proportion to its actual relevance.
Rather, it's that we take the stupidity from the other side as representative, and the stupidities from our own side as sui generis.

Maybe education as such has nothing to do with it, or is even counter-productive in that it tends to reward the ability to echo.


Or then again, maybe not.

To Be Educated...

A note from slightly longer ago than most of my notes:

Every systematic science, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two distinct kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called scientific knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of educational acquaintance with it. For an educated man should be able to form a fair off-hand judgement as to the goodness or badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this...

On the Parts of Animals, Book I Ch. 1; Aristotle

And I was thinking of this in the context of a Washington Post argument about chemistry requirements -- "Why Are You Forcing My Son to Take Chemistry?". In the Pipeline:

It's short, but it can be summarized as My son will not be a chemist. He will not be a scientist. A year of chemistry class will do nothing for him but make him miserable. He could be taking something else that would be doing him more good. And this father is probably right about his son, who's 15, not becoming any sort of scientist....

And today I see -- You Should Take Chemistry: A Response. In the Pipeline:

Should your son be forced to take chemistry? Absolutely. But the curriculum needs to be rethought in a way that would instill practical knowledge, curiosity about the world, and an appetite for at least understanding scientific achievement and its necessity/implications.
People don’t have to become scientists if they don’t want to, but they should have a fundamental understanding of scientific concepts. That way, people like myself need not be terrified that an ignorant public will vote to slash funding for scientific research and understanding...

So I wonder...it seems to me that the guy being quoted is going further than he should. It would be great to instill curiosity about the world and appetites for healthy things, it would be great if those who buy fish (or grow gardens) knew about elementary chemical concepts like pH, but what we need is for future voters to be educated in the Aristotelian sense. They need to be able to tell who to trust, in a world in which they cannot trust the authority of government because those who hold that authority frequently don't know what they're talking about, or possibly don't dare admit what they know because this would offend their core supporters.
Or then again, maybe not.

Thymio II Education Robot

Hmm..did I mention robotics lately? Your Kid Wants a Thymio II Education Robot - IEEE Spectrum

Yes, there's a trailer hook. So you can stop worrying about that. And those "mechanic fixation" points are Lego compatible. To program Thymio II, you can use a nifty graphical interface, or a simple programming language called Aseba that's similar to Matlab. And oh hey did we mention that this thing is open source from source code to hardware? 'Cause it is.
Seriously, $100 seems very cheap for a platform like this. It's cheap enough that a $1,000 grant could outfit an entire classroom with robots that are colorful, versatile, fun, and can be tackled with a GUI before graduating to writing code.

Of course there are even cheaper systems, like the rubber-band powered Walking paper Robot - YouTube.
Surely every kid should play with robots.
Or then again, maybe not.

OECD: International Education at a Glance 2012

The OECD Education at a Glance 2012 report is out; the Huffington Post leads with

while the U.S. boasts high education attainment levels overall, it lags behind other countries that are increasing attainment levels at a higher rate.

TechCrunch, however, says "who cares?". Why It’s Never Mattered That America’s Schools ‘Lag’ Behind Other Countries | TechCrunch

The scorecard for the U.S. is not pretty:

• The U.S. ranks 14th in higher education attainment at 42% of 25-34 with a degree, 20 points behind the leader, South Korea.
• The U.S. ranks 26th in early childhood education (69%)
• The U.S. is the 6th worst in terms of high school graduation, with 23% failing to attain a diploma

“Based on these trends, the U.S. may find that an increasing number of countries will approach or surpass its attainment levels in the coming years,” reads the U.S. report card.
However, the report implies that education translates into gainful market skills, an assumption not found in the research. For instance, while Chinese students, on average, have twice the number of instructional hours as Americans, both countries have identical scores on tests of scientific reasoning.

The author here thinks that maybe we shouldn't be trying to do what the other guys try so hard to do; it's not worth doing. He cites a 2008 article in Nature, responding to very similar international comparisons: Making the grade:

To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.
These are students who can enter the science and engineering workforce or are likely to innovate whatever their field of study. Remarkable, but little noted, is the fact that the United States produces the lion's share of the world's best students (see graph).

TechCrunch, and commenters at Slashdot, also comment on the importance of immigrants. So maybe we should combine those, and build on established American strengths; maybe local schools like Hamilton Central should work on what they offer to the top students (hey, we need a robotics team!) and try to ease budget pain by appealing to a reasonable number of international students, as some other NY schools have done...even to the extent of selling empty classroom seats abroad.
Or then again, maybe not.

Apps

I shouldn't skip educational apps -- here's a 2010 GeekDad review of Touch The Elements | GeekDad | Wired.com

if books like this were around when we were in school, it would have been a lot more fun to learn the periodic table.
Then again, this is no book. The Elements is an iPad application based on Theodore Gray’s beautiful hard cover book, The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. Containing similar information, the pictures and data come to live in the iPad application in a way they never could in a book... Each image can also be viewed in 3d with a pair of 3d glasses.

And here is what the same company is doing now...App Review: The Barefoot Atlas Lets You Explore The World | GeekDad | Wired.com

A beautifully illustrated globe greets you as you launch the app and colorful and animated icons pop up around the world begging to be touched. ... Kids can press the speaker icon to have the paragraph read to them and an index ...
The globe is fully rendered in 3D and looks like a kind of cartoon Google Earth....
Using a reoccurring feature of Touch Press apps, Wolfram Alpha integration offers additional statistics like currency conversion, transportation statistics and CO(2) emissions per year all updated in real time. The app even calculates how far away the country is from you by using your current location.
I gave my six year old son the iPad and started up the app.... We spent some time touching the animated icons so I could show him the interface, find the narration button and related images. Then let him explore on his own.

Let there be (LED) light...and math

Suppose that you wanted to lead up to an electronics/robotics/etc. curriculum. A STEAM (Science,Technology,Engineering,Art,Math) curriculum. This kind of thing would fit in there somewhere.
Basics: Picking Resistors for LEDs | Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

So… you just want to light up an LED. What resistor should you use?
Maybe you know the answer, or maybe everyone already assumes that you should know how to get to the answer. And in any case, it’s a question that tends to generate more questions before you actually can get an answer: What kind of LED are you using? What power supply? Battery? Plug-in? Part of a larger circuit? Series? Parallel?
Playing with LEDs is supposed to be fun, and figuring out the answers to these questions is actually part of the fun. There’s a simple formula that you use for figuring it out, Ohm’s Law. That formula is V = I × R, where V is the voltage, I is the current, and R is the resistance. But how do you know what numbers to plug into that formula to get out the right resistor value?