Tech Integration: Science
Science is about the secret codes and the challenge of finding them out. The secret codes live within the natural world. The challenge comes in the form of the scientist striving, failing, persisting, and finally mastering some corner of nature.
The secret codes can feel very remote from human understanding. We need the human stories of scientists at work to make science accessible, and to keep it honest. We are cultivating a set of practices and habits of thought, not a catalog of unchanging facts.
In this scheme, we risk having technology stand for the impersonal forces. After all, in special effects in movies, or in video games, the technology is there to create a seamless illusion and disappear from the process. But we side with the scientist, the active human. In early ages, we want technology to be the weapon of the scientist-hero: The wand of Harry Potter, or Arthur’s Excalibur. As children grow, they should stay aware of technology as a force that works between the spectator and the secrete forces of the universe.
K-2: Science as magic
Marvel at the magician at work
Consider the first two minutes of this video:
We have something perfect here: a child who is in control of scientific forces. Instead of just seeing the magnet trick, we connect to his excitement and curiosity. This is not really a video about magnetic forces, but a video about a magician.
Let us see a few more cases of scientists as magicians:
These enthusiastic people teach us that science makes regular people into magicians. They feel joy in their powers, and joy in sharing the concepts. Also: In each video, we see something strange and surprising happen. At this age, children understand the world through wonders and transformations. The gigantic block swiveling on a tiny rock; the man staring down the pendulum; the balloon that behaves like a prankster — these appeal to the child’s sense of wonder.
The teacher connects the wonders to real ideas. The teacher can pause the videos and ask: “What do you think is happening here? Why does this stop? Why does it go in that direction?” and start focusing on the words that give these wonders a handle. The teacher can slow time:
Not only did the ball stop where he said it would, it didn’t quite make it back. What would happen if we let it keep swinging? Why? Because some of the energy of the pendulum gets lost. A little bit always gets lost. What does it get lost to?
These are conversations that can go a good long time. We used these science demonstrations to open the door to them.
Teach the tools of observation
This will take 45 seconds:
What do we observe? We can extend our observations by freezing individual frames:
It looks like two different worlds. Who lives in each world? Who would the ruler of each world be? If we created a story for each word, with an animal as the hero, what would the title of the story be? What would the problem be in each story?
At this age, observation is a form of imagination. You might be able to force children to focus on what is, rather than what on what could be. Doing so would be a waste. Think of the technology as giving their imaginations a scientific context. The imagery keeps them connected to a real phenomenon.
Now we can view the seasons another way:
The kind of software that puts the earth in space compared to the sun is available freely. With these tools, tech-adventurous teachers can place the earth at any instant and view it from any angle. This is a much different scale than that of the seasons within the forest. Imagine if we can induce even one student to understand that they are showing us the same thing! Science lets us be a rabbit in the grass and a camera in space.
It is a form of magic. It should be made perfectly clear what tools are making the magic happen. Most presenters aim to polish their tech skills until they are transparent to the audience; the technology drops out of view. Teachers should do the opposite: Show the students the tools in action, and work through the process while thinking out loud. In this way, students absorb the technology as part of the process.
Consider simulators, videos, microscopes and other scientific instruments and teach how they work as tools of observation.
Grades 3–5: The limits of what is possible
Measure the limits of reality.
In younger ages, we show science as magical forces at play within our world. Now we can begin to name and use those magical forces. Think of the forces of nature as tools that have handles: The handles are the units of measurement, the formulas behind them, the names for phenomena we cannot observe directly.
Teachers and students should begin to use those handles. Use numbers to control time. Use words to control what we see. Use algorithms (machine procedures) to control simulations of the world.
Now, for example, we can methodically speed up and slow down time to observe forces and processes. Most smartphones and tablets have apps that let us pick time intervals for stop-motion films, and cameras with controllable shutter speeds will let us measure the distance that objects travel in a time interval.
We should connect the kinds of observations we make at the direct, human scale to greater extremes on the scale. For example, suppose we have a motion sensor that captures the velocities of different objects. Now we can put our findings in the context of this (admittedly cheesy) video comparing the speed of objects, from snails all the way up to the speed of light:
Experiment with making different representations.
Technology gives us great power to play with graphics: To distort; to tweak; to bring out what is not obvious.
Consider:
This graphic is obviously made by a professional. This was made by me, behaving as a 4th grader, in about 8 minutes:
The real discovery being made here is in the comparison by scale, which is visually direct and engaging. Then we can move on to greater abstractions:
I am not vouching for the accuracy of the sizing of these flames — it is an approximation. Similarly, we want to engage students with their reasoning process in producing similar graphics. Still, there is no way to produce these with any fidelity without contending with the meaning of the measurements. This is exactly what we want them to do.
Use programming to discover natural laws
We should use the kid-friendly programming platform of Scratch to do some simulations of movement. Objects in Scratch are on a 2-dimensional grid (x is horizontal, y is vertical) and their movement and position can be controlled programmatically, with visual blocks. As such, it can be an excellent playground for studying physics. Consider this simulation of apples dropping. You can click on this version, then click on each apple to see the code blocks that control it.
The “Repeat until y position < -160” is just what keeps the apple from falling off the bottom of the screen. Look at the other code blocks. The code for the first apple just sets its position to a certain y position, over and over again. For the second apple, the code tells it to change its y position over and over again. The third apple is more complex. The apple has a y momentum, and changes its position based on that. The y momentum keeps growing (in a negative way); that is like the effect of gravity. (Apples #4 and #5 add bouncing, with and without the effect of friction.)
Students will observe that the apple falls faster and faster; this is more like the real behavior of falling objects. Actually, we could check against measurements from real life to see which models it most accurately. Silly though this programming tool looks, it has a power to simulate reality that scientists of the past would have envied greatly.
Grades 6–8: Argument
Make the forces of science into character-based dramas.
This goes against our sense of right and wrong. Scientists fight against the common urge to anthropomorphize. But this is such a personal age, when students are aware of social interactions, right and wrong, power and identity. We should embed these struggles into our way of viewing science.
The scientist is struggling to find the truth. Many times society scorns the scientist (Galileo, Louis Pasteur). Sometimes the scientists struggles against physical challenges (Marie Curie, or read the accounts of the ordeals scientists went through to measure the transits of Venus in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything). Most often the scientist struggles against the obscurity of the science itself, and against the limits of data and human thought (see Isaac Newton, who teetered between genius and madness his entire life).
We may choose the see the physical world as struggling. The planet in orbit is rushing away from the star and falling into it at the same time, in perpetual balance. The particles in the nucleus of the atom want to explode away from each other but are held in place by the immense local power of the strong nuclear force. How many such vivid stories could we tell about potential energy, or gene replication, or oceanography?
For such storytelling we need a stable underpinning. Technology can provide us with the models, demonstrations and data against which to practice telling these vivid stories. Consider, for example, this interactive model of an atom. Spend a few minutes playing with it (choose “atom” and turn “Stable/Unstable” on).
Now try to use the given model to answer these questions:
- If an atom wants to be something and have a name, what does it need? What decides what name we give the atom?
- Will the first two electrons let another electron join them? Where do the electrons want to go?
- One poor little neutron, all alone, doesn’t have an identity, and it’s unstable. Not even many neutrons together can make anything. But atoms with more than one proton need neutrons to stay stable. Why this is so takes some practice and reading, and is still a little head-splitting. (Try this video for a start.) But we can at least know what kind of character we’re dealing with when we consider the neutron.
If we had students able to fluently describe a system in these character-driven terms, and able to set them against a reliable model, we would be happy. Let us put together the pieces that would let this happen. We give the students the model to play with. We coach them on observing the model in terms of wants, tries, decides and other verbs that tell an active story. Then we give students the experience of telling such stories with further research (ions, nuclear decay).
Notice that the model keeps us tethered to scientific reality. A student telling stories about the atom, without a model to test the stories against, might come up with something disastrously wild. We can make a similar stable backdrop by giving students data, data visualizations — or by asking them to create models of their own.
Teach visualizations that reward study.
An enlarged version is here. Please give this graphic the time it requires to make full sense and yield all the insights it contains. It abides by the directive of the great Edward Tufte that it is better to have people study data than to dictate it to them.
We cannot make students absorb every detail of this graphic. But we can ask that they start with the information to produce something new. For instance, consider this example of the same graphic transformed through a service known as Thinglink. Any of the dots on the graphic will take you to related articles or graphics. When we see something like this, we know the students dug deeply into the details.
Bring hidden formulas into visible form
If we are teaching students who learned enough code to create their own simulations, we can insist on richer and more detailed code that makes more visible. Think of students building block-code versions of gravitation, population growths, ecosystems. Even if the results are unpolished, the fact of having to think about the nature of real systems in order to build models of them is powerful.
Formulas can also live as formulas in spreadsheets. One of the most powerful activities we could do would be to collect real data and see how it fits various formulas.
Imagine, for instance, that we begin with the question: Why do objects that are closer to us seem larger than objects that are farther away? And how would we model this? We might begin by using photographs, of an object against a ruler:
Now we can enter this data in a spreadsheet, and find the curve it yields:
This curve might be familiar: It is an inverse exponential curve. Roughly speaking, it means that the apparent size drops by half as its distance doubles.
If we know these formulas and we have some experience with programming, we can use that information to make this bit of realistic silliness, which just happens to use some formulas that are crucial to video game programming. We are modeling the world with formulas — science!
Grades 9–12: Systems within systems
Use the tools that practicing scientists use
Our standard image of a scientist as pouring liquids from one flask to another is less accurate than ever. A survey of scientists from American Scientist found that respondents
work an average of 48 hours a week, of which 30 percent is spent developing software and 40 percent is spent using it. They also report that these proportions are going up — 45 percent of respondents say that scientists spend more or much more of their time developing scientific software than they did 5 years ago, and 70 percent say that they spend more or much more time using it.
So much for the paleontologist in the buttes or the astronomer at the telescope. We are more likely to find either one either writing grants or cooking up the software to build their models.
We ought to help students transition from using Scratch and other toy programming environments to learning the R programming language or using industrial-strength spreadsheet formulas. But let us not decide before we speak to scientists directly about what skills they master.
Create and maintain your own systems of understanding
Science fans out into specialties from high school on. By the time of graduate studies, very few scientists know much beyond the narrow band of their own studies. (I know a woman who studied the nervous systems of nematodes, but know almost nothing about nematodes generally.) High school is too early to let science fragment completely. If we want students to view the whole jigsaw of science as one image, we will need to teach them to put the pieces together.
Technology gives us excellent tools for organizing knowledge. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a way to pull diverse scientific work into a unified format. At the time he was working at CERN, a particle physics research laboratory.
“In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…” (source)
We are replaying this same dilemma. Students attending classes in chemistry, physics, biology and other sciences get different data in different formats, kept in different places. Pulling them into one knowledge base so the information talks across specialties would be hard work, but valuable.
Consider the wiki: With a little use, the wiki proliferates into a huge network of connected concepts, with organization both top-down (from general to specific subjects) or across subjects (the idea of a “reaction” cuts across both chemistry and physics).
Or let us return to Tim Berners-Lee and consider the cover of his draft proposal for what became the World Wide Web:
Is this formal and limited? Certainly. But scientific knowledge is formal, and any image we make of it has limits. The experience of trying to create such a map is valuable. Give students time and the expectation to weave these dense webs of information.
The goal is for students to gain experience with making representations of what they know. We can practice this in any academic discipline, but science is ideal.