andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-516 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Columbia College has for many years had a Core Curriculum, in which students read classics such as Plato (in translation) etc. A few years ago they created a Science core course. There was always some confusion about this idea: On one hand, how much would college freshmen really learn about science by reading the classic writings of Galileo, Laplace, Darwin, Einstein, etc.? And they certainly wouldn’t get much out by puzzling over the latest issues of Nature, Cell, and Physical Review Letters. On the other hand, what’s the point of having them read Dawkins, Gould, or even Brian Greene? These sorts of popularizations give you a sense of modern science (even to the extent of conveying some of the debates in these fields), but reading them might not give the same intellectual engagement that you’d get from wrestling with the Bible or Shakespeare. I have a different idea. What about structuring the entire course around computer programming and simulation? Start with a few weeks t
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1 Columbia College has for many years had a Core Curriculum, in which students read classics such as Plato (in translation) etc. [sent-1, score-0.216]
2 A few years ago they created a Science core course. [sent-2, score-0.183]
3 There was always some confusion about this idea: On one hand, how much would college freshmen really learn about science by reading the classic writings of Galileo, Laplace, Darwin, Einstein, etc. [sent-3, score-0.4]
4 These sorts of popularizations give you a sense of modern science (even to the extent of conveying some of the debates in these fields), but reading them might not give the same intellectual engagement that you’d get from wrestling with the Bible or Shakespeare. [sent-7, score-0.487]
5 What about structuring the entire course around computer programming and simulation? [sent-9, score-0.275]
6 Start with a few weeks teaching the students some programming language that can do simulation and graphics. [sent-10, score-0.468]
7 (R is a little clunky and Matlab is not open-source. [sent-11, score-0.09]
8 ) After the warm-up, students can program simulations each week: - Physics: simulation of bouncing billiard balls, atomic decay, etc. [sent-13, score-0.652]
9 - Chemistry: simulation of chemical reactions, cool graphs of the concentrations of different chemicals over time as the reaction proceeds - Biology: evolution and natural selection And so forth. [sent-14, score-0.576]
10 There could be lecture material connecting these simulations with relevant scientific models. [sent-15, score-0.476]
11 Here are the details on Columbia’s science core course . [sent-19, score-0.412]
12 During the rest of the week, senior faculty and Columbia post-doctoral science fellows lead seminars to discuss the lecture and its associated readings, plan and conduct experiments, and debate the implications of the most recent scientific discoveries. [sent-21, score-1.276]
13 I took a look at the lecture materials (written by Prof. [sent-22, score-0.263]
14 David Helfand of the astronomy department) and they look pretty good to me. [sent-23, score-0.082]
15 I don’t know about the rest of the course, though. [sent-26, score-0.092]
16 Discussing the lecture and readings seems ok, but can you really expect a roomful of freshmen to plan and conduct experiments? [sent-27, score-0.902]
17 And I don’t know what they’ll get out of debating the implications of the most recent scientific discoveries. [sent-29, score-0.376]
18 Debating might be fun but I don’t see it getting them closer to learning about science. [sent-30, score-0.086]
19 The discussion period can be fun, but ultimately I think it functions mostly as a way to enforce that students do the reading. [sent-32, score-0.216]
20 Maybe next semester I can sit in on one of the seminars and see what happens there. [sent-34, score-0.291]
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