This is my proposal for a 2010 micro-TEDxEast talk.
A related prezi can be found here: http://bit.ly/8Y19PG .
The main idea of this video is that we can change the way students look at the world by simply changing the focus of education. Instead of focusing on different subjects (i.e. views of the world), we can focus on studying objects, from many different views. This object-centered education allows us to help students understand subjects (views) they find difficult by relating it to the views of the world they do understand.
An example:
Let's look at Jell-O from several different views.
View 1 is your everyday observations. Here you know that Jell-O comes in a packet, is mixed with hot water, is cooled, and then forms a squishy solid. You understand View 1 really well. You've made Jell-O. You've touched Jell-O. You've eaten Jell-O. You love Jell-O.
Now I will use different parts of View 1 for Jell-O to help you understand other views of the world.
View 2 is more detailed observations (i.e. engineering). Here we are asking you to go beyond what you typically observe only in that you will be making measurements and running different experiments. The view is still the same; we are just looking more carefully. We are interested in talking about how much a material deforms when it is pressed on. We can put a weight on a piece of Jell-O and measure how its thickness changes. We can use different amounts of water to make Jell-O and observe how the Jell-O becomes stiffer when there is less water used per Jell-O packet. We can talk about "elasticity" being a word in the language of engineers that quantifies (or creates a standard numeric measure for) this fuzzy concept of stiffness. Then we can defined elasticity as a specific relationship between the weight (i.e. the applied force) and the amount of thickness change (i.e. the deformation). Remembering at the end of all this, that all we have done is been more precise in our observations and defined a new word to help us talk about our observation in a precise way.
View 3 is the view under an imaginary high-powered microscope (i.e. polymer chemistry). Here we are asking you to think about what is going on inside a material: What is stuff made of? We begin by discussing the types of molecules inside of Jell-O. We relate this to View 1 because we know that the only two things in Jell-O are water and the stuff in Jell-O powder. We know what happens when we heat and cool plain water (i.e. we all have View 1 of water). This implies that all of the interesting behavior must have a lot to do with the stuff in the Jell-O packet. We know that we don't have to add very much stuff from the packet (i.e. there is much more water then powder). We can introduce the fact that the powder in the packet is made up of the long chains of molecules (i.e. polymers called proteins) in gelatin. These are in contrast the small H2O molecules of water. We can discuss what the heating and cooling does to the stuff in the packet. How do these long chains begin? Tangled individually. What happens when we add heat? They untangle. What happens when we cool? They re-tangle, but this time with their neighbors. What is the effect of this? This tangling entraps the water, and we get the squishy solid we know and love. Your existing understanding of View 1, gives you a frame to hang this new information on. You understand the steps required to make Jell-O. Now you learned what happens microscopically during each of those steps.
We can go further and relate the microscopic view (View 3) to the detailed macroscopic view (View 2): We know that as we add more powder, Jell-O becomes stiffer (i.e. in our new language it "increases its elasticity"). More powder (i.e. more polymer chains) mean more tangling, leading to stiffer Jell-O's (i.e. higher elasticity)!
View 4 is a view the historic development of Jell-O (i.e. social studies). View 3 told us what was inside the Jell-O packet from a microscopic point of view (i.e. what types of molecules it was made of), but what IS the material inside the packet? Gelatin. Where does gelatin come from? Animal bones and stuff (and here we can go back to View 3 and talk about animal proteins versus other proteins, depending on the background of the class). How was gelatin discovered? How has it been used throughout history? When did we first start eating gelatin? When was Jell-O introduced? et cetera, et cetera.
View 5 is ...
The provenance of these thoughts are my experiences as a teaching fellow for Harvard's general education course: Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. Here we present three different views of the same thing. We note both everyday and more precise observations from cooking foods. Then we discuss the microscope phenomena that lead to these observations. Finally we relate these two views using mathematics. The education value of this method has been truly remarkable.
Loading...
5:59
gelatinby donkknow14,615 views
Link to this comment:
All Comments (0)