by emptypockets
A good summary of at least part of what's ailing science education in the U.S. is presented in a front-page article in the Times today. Unfortunately, it's not the substance of the article that's informative, but the piece itself -- a dismissive view of lab courses written and edited by folks who seem to be in need of a refresher lesson themselves. I just couldn't let this go:
Prompted by skeptical university professors, the College Board, one of the most powerful organizations in American education, is questioning whether Internet-based laboratories are an acceptable substitute for the hands-on culturing of gels and peering through microscopes that have long been essential ingredients of American laboratory science.
This sentence is a reasonable statement to be made, for example, by a character on CSI. Or by someone picking arbitrary jargon and stringing it together (which amounts to the same thing as what they do for CSI). In the real world, though, there is no such thing as "culturing of gels" -- culturing means to grow an organism under controlled conditions and a gel is any kind of inert matrix, routinely used to separate DNA or protein molecules of different sizes. It would be like a political article saying "the gerrymandering of PACs." Only a political writer wouldn't say that, because reporters have at least a vague idea of how an election works. Combined with the phrase "peering through microscopes," which reduces the last decade's revolution in imaging to an obscure and slightly eccentric preoccupation, I can't help but get the feeling that this writer, the story editor, and the front-page editor, are not familiar with the rudiments of lab practice and feel that it's somewhat beneath them to consider it. None of that discourages them from presenting the argument that wet lab courses may be replaced by computer simulations with nothing lost.
In a nutshell, that is a large part of the problem with science education in the U.S. Most adults are ignorant of it (which is not their fault, as the field has changed so quickly -- if you're more than 55 years old then they probably didn't even have DNA in your high school bio class), and see it as a strange and perhaps dangerous pursuit unless it leads to cures for disease, more medicine than science. As with the Times writers, however, unfamiliarity with the subject doesn't discourage bloviation on how it should be taught. How many of those debaters on both sides of the evolution argument, exhausting such passions over the content of a high school bio syllabus, can remember a single lesson from their own school days? How can one care so deeply about science education without caring about science itself?
The blame is not to be laid on a disinterested public alone. Science has been changing quickly, so most of what you learned in school is well out of date; science builds heavily on recent developments, so it is difficult to understand what's happening today without understanding what was happening five years ago; and scientists often do not bother to try to bring people up to speed or to engage the public. The first two can't be helped, but the last is changing, slowly. There is a movement to make increasing numbers of articles available free and on-line, more scientists are moving to blogs, and groups like SEforA are trying to bridge the professional-layperson divide.
As to the substance of the article, one of the Times blog commenters gets it about right:
As a high school student, I never did a science lab experiment that was anything but a silly time waster. The equipment in a typical high school lab can be mastered by a typical 6th-grader in a short amount of time, imo. I was an A student and enjoyed science classes, especially chemistry, but the labs were underchallenging (an understatement) and boring. For those students planning a career in science and for advanced science classes, the hands-on lab (with some *real*, challenging projects) is useful, no doubt. For the rest of us who plan on never holding another beaker or test tube, let us go virtual.
and the sentiment is echoed somewhat more formally in this comment as well. Virtual labs are fine as an extension of the textbook. And indeed extending the textbook is the goal of most classroom labs -- not discovery. As far as that goes, I tend to agree with the student who finds them boring and silly time wasters. The best lab experience I ever had as a student was when we built a large wooden scaffold that the teacher strung with lights, bells, relays, switches, buttons, batteries, and wires ending in alligator clips. We were to rig it up so that, for example, the light went on and the bell rang when you pushed the button; then, to make it so the light shut off when you pushed the button; then, to make the bell ring but the light go off when you flipped the switch but only while holding the button; or whatever combination we could dream up. It was unguided and unscripted, it was play and discovery. That doesn't work in most classrooms, unfortunately, but that is the real joy of science -- every day (well, perhaps every week or two) we learn something in the lab about how life works, and we are the first and only ones in the world to know it. That is a real pleasure, an original discovery. By definition, that is not something you can do in a computer program, where all the possible outcomes have already been scripted.
Designing a better science curriculum, that incorporates real discovery to give students a taste of what research is really about, combined with interesting teaching tools like computer simulators to help them learn what's already known, is a worthwhile pursuit. But it needs to be done by people -- including newspaper reporters and editors -- who care as much about science as they do about kibbitzing policy. Getting them up to speed is going to take some work, of a kind those of us who spend our days "culturing gels" aren't used to.
I am probably being too harsh on them over what may be a typo or an overzealous last-minute editor -- the writer may be better informed than I give credit for -- but I think my basic argument stands, with or without the convenient illustration this article provides.
The Times does have a track record of not knowing what the hell they're talking about in science articles, though -- my favorite correction is
(This would be kind of like a long detailed article on House races having to run a correction, "Actually it turns out that Senators are members of the Senate, not the House as was stated, and there are sometimes more than 2 House members per state." A basic confusion on the fundamentals.)
Posted by: emptypockets | October 20, 2006 at 20:39
As with the Times writers, however, unfamiliarity with the subject doesn't discourage bloviation on how it should be taught.
just like politics.
Posted by: DemFromCT | October 20, 2006 at 21:00
yes, your posts on national pundits' insights into local CT politics came to mind as I was jotting this one down.
Posted by: emptypockets | October 20, 2006 at 21:55
I wonder how much of this - in politics, science, or anything else - comes from the notion that reporters shouldn't be experts, as if knowledge of their subject will taint them in some way. In politics it tends to be talked about as an avoidance of bias, but I think there's also something more basic to reporters on all different topics, and it's just unbelievably counter-productive.
Posted by: MissLaura | October 20, 2006 at 22:22
I was right with you until you pulled exactly the sort of blunder that you are (justifiably) taking the Times to task for:
The "all possible outcomes have already been scripted" view of computers was dead in computer science by the late 1960s, if not before. By the early nineties anyone with any interest in computers should have realized for themselves that the view is, to put it bluntly, wrong. By then, word processors were common enough for everyday people with passing familiarity with the subject to realize that "all possible outcomes" of computer programs were not "scripted in advance."
In today's world of blogs and browsers (which, I should point out, are just computer programs) the view is simply unsupportable. Remember, when you visit youtube, when you play an online game, when you read a blog or send an e-mail, you are simply running a computer program, or a collection of programs, just as students using the simulators are doing.
Then tell me again about "all possible outcomes" being "scripted".
--MarkusQ
P.S. To pile on the irony, "widget kit" experimentation games such as you describe are an ideal example of something that is better done in simulation, since each student can have a much larger array of components available (far more than any school could afford), they can save their inventions, work independently or collectively, and so forth.
And such programs have been available for twenty years, at least.
Posted by: MarkusQ | October 20, 2006 at 22:33
MarkusQ, does the lab simulation software they describe allow unpredictable outcomes? If it does, how does it generate those outcomes? How well do they hold up to empirical results?
You're right in general that computer programs can produce surprising results -- although I'd say that for a blog, it is the users on the other end who are providing the surprises and not anything within typepad (although typepad does come up with some surprising behavior, not in a good way). More to the point, advanced simulators can produce surprising results that were not 'built in' to the program -- rather, they emerge from the assumptions that are built into it.
But can you think of an example where a computer generated a result that told us something about the real world that we didn't know when the program was written? At least in biology, that's not the case -- some software (much more advanced than the classroom stuff discussed in the article) is able to generate new models to explain existing data, or take existing models and generate new predictions, but I can't think of any discovery, at least in biology, that could be generated by a computer program and isn't just a product of the assumptions that go into the machine.
Posted by: emptypockets | October 20, 2006 at 22:52
Taking one point at a time (sorted somewhat differently, to bring related points together):
and also
You seem to be assuming that "surprising results" and "unpredictable outcomes" are something that has to be put in somewhere or intentionally generated by something. But that simply isn't the case. You come closer to the mark later when you say:
...but you don't seem to grasp the significance of this point. The programs "allow for unpredictable outcomes" in the same way a word processor does; by allowing the user to create interesting combinations of simple elements (letters, pixels, relays and light bulbs, or whatever).
Your underlying assumption, that letting the user combine things at will can not produce anything interesting (presumably because the system is "just following rules") doesn't hold up to even superficial scrutiny. The real world parts, after all, were slavishly obeying the laws of physics, yet that didn't prevent them from exhibiting interesting behavior, did it?
Yes, I can think of such cases, but that isn't really the point. "Lab work" has at least three distinct purposes, and no good will come of confounding them, as we are very close to doing.
Your points about empirical results and telling us things we didn't know are aimed at the third case, while the NYTimes article and my comments were aimed at the first (and possibly second).
But since you asked, there have been several famous proofs in mathematics performed by computer, as well as a great deal of modeling in the physical sciences. Further, a fair amount of work in taxonomy, genenomics, and ecology is essentially done by computer and there have been a number of discoveries in these fields that would not have been possible without using computers.
I apologize if this post seems somewhat rambling. I've tried to keep it organized but I'm about to fall asleep (I came back to see if you'd responded after putting my son to bed, but it's been a long day).
I'll check back tomorrow.
--MarkusQ
P.S. My main point was, however, that your assumption that "all possible outcomes of a computer program are scripted in advance" is as bad as the "culturing gels" remark that you were responding to. To show how flawed it is, you should only need to consider a single example (say, a word processor) and ask yourself "Are all possible outcomes of using this program 'scripted' or 'just a product of the assumptions' that the programmer built into it?" to see how silly it is.
Posted by: MarkusQ | October 21, 2006 at 00:11
MarkusQ,
The analogous assumption for wordprocessors is that "all possible letters are scripted in advance". And that is, indeed, true. The purpose of empirical research is not to confirm what we know, but rather to find out where our inferences are wrong. We reason from incomplete information and it is impossible, in principle and (obviously) in practice, to ever get complete information. Algorithmic processes are founded on complete information and so are very different from experimental inquiry. Any simulation of natural phenomena (such as might be used for a computer based lab) is either going to have physical laws built in ("all possible outcomes scripted in advance") or it's going to depart from physical reality (the results might be surprising, but they won't correspond to the way nature really is). EmptyPockets has this just right.
High school labs (and undergrad labs, for the most part) are not really very good imitations of real experiments. At best, they allow people to become familiar with equipment and techniques and ways to avoid harming themselves and others. It's really only when nobody else in the world knows for sure how the experiment will turn out that labwork becomes exiting. Basically, you're just doing scales without ever being allowed to play music in high school labs. Could someone learn to play the piano through computer simulation (i.e. without an actual keyboard that produced sound)? Could you learn to carve wood through computer simulation? Experimental science is a craft that can only be learned through an apprenticeship where one actually does the thing one is trying to learn.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | October 21, 2006 at 02:24
"much ado about nothing" here.
Programs, lab equipment, machines, tools, instruments are generally only as good as their operators.
A superior operator usually means success or at least quick resolving of any problems.
I had a professor. When told something was fool proof, he was likely to retort "Well you can make it fool proof, but you can't make it student proof."
Posted by: Jodi | October 21, 2006 at 06:29
Actually this is an important debate because in educational finance circles there is now considerable interest in removing the science lab from the High School building, and instead establishing a variety of science centers where students would spend a few weeks each year in a superior lab environment, and with specifically trained lab teachers, carrying out projects planned on computers, via E-Mail and all, emerging out of the basic science classes. State Legislators are going to be prepared to deal with this proposal in the near future.
I suspect you could create instructional electronic replications of most of the classic experimental work that underlays the scientific disciplines. There is great value, I suspect, in providing a very accessable way for students to essentially replicate these, learn to keep notes, make an analysis of results, and then compare these with classic examples. It isn't creative particularly, certainly not cutting edge stuff, but done properly it can build up comprehension of Scientific Method -- experimental demonstration and data collection methods, applications and all. Electronic means are probably much better for this than following line diagrams in a text book or on a lab sheet. The student entering a decent lab with a project would be much more stimulated, I think, if they already had all this background in a more or less electronic interactive way.
What needs to be understood here is that the computer and electronic technology needs to be dependable, unless we want to retrain and expect all teachers to be techies. If the technology gets in the way of content in a major way -- you change the subject from a science exploration to solving a computer glitch. I am not certain we have that reliability yet.
But teachers will need retraining, no question there. Policy makers will have to understand that money saved by not putting Physics and Chem labs in high schools, but supporting a science center, will also have to be spent on continuous teacher training and refresher programs. The role of teacher profoundly changes -- no longer will the teacher offer a generic lesson plan, instead if it is done right, the teacher will individualize -- be able to "read" precisely where a student is in terms of accomplishment and interest, and plug in exactly the proper next piece that takes the student forward. That is going to be hard. And for political reasons, it will probably have to be done in an environment of state or national assessment tests.
Posted by: Sara | October 21, 2006 at 08:22
Ken Muldrew --
No, it is false. I can download fonts, or even create new fonts, and new character set, at will. "All possible letters" certainly aren't "scripted in advance."
And, in any case, that isn't at all the proper analogy. The underlying point, that software simulations are limited as teaching tools because "all possible outcomes are scripted" calls for an analogy at the "outcome" level -- the story or essay produced, not the letters used.
You certainly wouldn't make the analogous claim, that computer programs such as word processors are useless for teaching writing because all possible outcomes (or, as you would have it, "all possible letters") are scripted in advance, would you?
As for the rest of your post, you are persistently confusing levels and misrepresenting the purpose of various activities. Lab work in early science programs fills two main rolls: familiarizing students with the interactions between concepts they have learned, and letting them acquire some practice with lab techniques. Computer simulations are quite useful for the former but not so much for the later. But lab work in early science courses is not research, is not intended to uncover new facts about nature, and this is true no matter what tools are used.
Why assume that a computer simulation of a piano can't have a keyboard and can't produce sound? Where have you been the last twenty five years? Computer simulations of pianos, with keyboards, that produce sound, have been available to the general public since the early eighties, at least.
And yes, they are quite useful for teaching piano, especially at an introductory level. They have a number of advantages, being physically smaller, cheaper, and easier to maintain/modify, with the ability to use earphones and thus let multiple students practice at once in the same room, etc. Note that many of these same advantages are found in other computer teaching simulations, such as flight and driving simulators, the widget kit I mentioned, etc.
--MarkusQ
P.S. It strikes me as very weird that people seem to be stuck with a 1950's stereotype of computers (much like, I suppose, the NYT's "peering through microscopes" gaff) even though, by the very fact that they are posting here they might be expected to have a tad more modern view of computers and what they are actually capable of.
Posted by: MarkusQ | October 21, 2006 at 09:41
MarkusQ,
I wasn't talking about the appearance of the letters but the underlying logical representation. An "a" is the same letter whether rendered in Helvetica or Times Roman. If it makes you feel better, you could ask whether a word processor has all the ascii codes scripted in advance (i.e. can the operator convince the computer to move to a 32 bit ascii-like code when the word processor has been programmed for a 16 bit ascii code--just by doing things within the word processor shell itself). The rest of your post similarly misses the point by miles in order to arrive at your nonsense about not understanding computers.
Emptypocket's original post describes how computer simulation cannot recreate the thrill of discovery that attends doing experiments for real because the simulation program has all the results in memory before the simulation is run. If you want to argue against that proposition then you have to show how the simulation program derives new results that could not, in principle, have been known to the programmers when they wrote the simulation.
Once you understand that then you can argue that the simulations are still good pedagogical tools (which would be on topic and is certainly worth discussing) and abandon the condescending foolishness that has arisen as a result of your misunderstanding.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | October 21, 2006 at 10:37
When I was in high school scientists understood DNA and I slowly got the idea, but the bio labs were pretty basic (algae and pigs as I recall) but chem was fun because we created stuff (esters that smelled like bananas).
I actually became a molecular biologist, PhD et al - not because of high school science labs but because of a wonderful girl friend in high school who loved science, a remarkable professor in college who did research, and my own curiosity.
My high school wants me to donate unneeded money for various unnecessary projects but I still think the sort of labs we had then would be fine for high school, I would donate money for better labs in college as I think this is where the experience is crucial. I see this high school lab debate as part of the overblown anxiety people have about getting their kids into good colleges.
This all reminds me of an article in today's times about unnecessary fundraising by elite universities: "The University of Big Fundraising."
Maybe some of the debate is also a kind of juggernaut fueled by researchers who want cheap labor without having to deal with grad students (a partial snark)?
From my experience no amount of money or equipment could ever have replaced the inspiration I gained from my high school friend and my college professor in my becoming a scientist. The other thing is to remain curious, this is more important than grades.
Posted by: kim | October 21, 2006 at 10:42
I would suggest that the most haunting poem, most funny short story, greatest essay ever written are not "interesting" or "surprising" in a scientific sense because they do not challenge our assumptions about language. And I put those two words in quotes because I realize I've been using them differently than the common usage, and that may have caused some consternation. No doubt to us personally great writing is interesting and surprising, but scientifically it is what we would expect -- a similar non-computer example would be painting, where colors can be mixed to generate beauty. But there are few scientific surprises there, since we know paint sticks to canvas and we know pigments absorb light and how those properties interact. If one paints the virgin mary with elephant dung, it is surprising to as observers; if one paints the virign mary with elephant dung and we notice her eyes glow in the dark, it is surprising to us as scientists. Few computer programs can challenge our assumptions, because they were built on our assumptions. MarkusQ is right that there are exceptions but so far they are teaching us more about our models than about biology. And none of them are likely to be used in the classroom.
The classroom simulators are more like having 1,000,000 bottles of paint at hand. You can mix them however you like, and your resources are much more vast than you would ever have for 'real' in a classroom setting. One can debate whether the computer accurately simulates brushstrokes and technique, and that is pretty much where the on-line lab debate has been. But you are not going to discover something that glows, something that challenges your assumptions about how paint behaves -- because those assumptions, as for word processors, as for almost all computer programs, are built into the machine.
What's interesting in biology is when you get a surprise. What's interesting is when you have a prediction, do the experiment that tests it, and get the wrong answer. What's also interesting and surprising is when you notice something, off to the side, that isn't what you expected -- that isn't what anyone in the world could have expected, because it hasn't been seen before. You can introduce that surprise into a computer, but it can't (by definition) teach us something new about the biological world. Only living matter can teach us that.
Now, for decades that has not been the purpose of teaching labs. The purpose of teaching labs has been to follow the instructions and get the expected result. There's apparently education theory that says that students learn the material better this way (personally, I didn't). But those labs are the anathema of what science is about. In fact, most textbook teaching is -- learning what's known, as if it were codified and static and not open to surprises, is the death of science, and the death of the love of science.
Real science is about questioning assumptions, and looking for surprises. I appreciate that's not historically what teaching labs do. But I wish they would. And because they happen in the real world, even though students are supposed to follow the lesson plan there is at least the opportunity for the pathologically curious and teenagedly idealistic to try things their own way and make-believe that they might discover something new. The computerized version of that lab dampens that hope (and redirects it to trying to out-smart the computer, and figure out how to send instant messages and check out web sites instead of doing the lesson -- which gets to Sara's points about reliability). On the other hand, for the ones who are following the lesson plan and learning science as it is written in stone, as if all discoveries had been made, the computer labs will probably be good teaching tools for learning what's already known.
The point is I kind of don't care that much about how you run those teaching labs that aren't aimed at discovery. What I'm interested in is bringing more real research into the early classroom. I can think of at least two recent Nobels where the work could have been done in a high school classroom, in principle -- the yeast cell cycle prize just needed toothpicks and culture media (in fact in the lobby of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, where Lee Hartwell works there is a small shrine with a yeast plate, some toothpicks, some velvet, and a wooden block with a statement like "this is the equipment Hartwell used for the research which was awarded the Nobel Prize") and similarly for the first C. elegans prize all you need is a microscope and a LOT of patience.
Doing real research in the classroom is not, I think, quixotic, but it does demand a lot of the teachers and of the school districts, policymakers, and funders. It demands that they appreciate what science is about. The level of learning we can give our students is only reflective of the level of understanding and love for the subject we have ourselves. That's why I think these science outreach efforts -- at the adult level -- are so important, and why my teeth grate when I see articles on policy that seem to be written without a love of the substance.
Posted by: emptypockets | October 21, 2006 at 12:03
Ken Muldrew --
First, the bulk of emptypocket's original post (which I suggest you reread) is devoted to two errors in the Times article, the use of the phrases "culturing gels" and "peering through microscopes" which reveal the author's lack of understanding of the subject. As an aside, he makes a claim about computer science (which you repeat) that shows a comparable lack of understanding of that subject.
Now, in some contexts it might be reasonably to say I shouldn't nit pick to such a level, but it is hypocritical to do so when the whole discussion is predicated on just this sort of attention to detail.
Second, your claim that...
...simply isn't true. It is wrong. Factually incorrect. It shows, in short, as much of a lack of comprehension of the subject matter as the quotes emptypockets called out. I don't know how much clearer I can make it.
Simulations do not have all the results in memory before the simulation is run, and they would not be so widely used in actual research (as opposed to student labs) if that were the case. Simulations generally (but not always) have some pre-established set of premises "hard coded" into them, but the consequences of these are generally not known before the simulation is run. In fact, that's the whole reason that people use simulation software in the first place.
Which is why I said "character sets" as well as "fonts" (though a typography wonk would be justified in starting a new thread here off my casual and technically questionable use of these terms).
Yes, they can. There are editors (such as Emacs) that have been specifically designed to have exactly this sort of extensibility. And since you are claiming that it is impossible (not rare, or unheard of, or not-yet-implemented) all I need is one example to prove you wrong. But even run of the mill word processors, such as you probably have on your desktop right now, can be made to do a wide range of things that were not "scripted in" (or even anticipated) by their designers. They can, for example, get worms and viruses which will make them take various malicious actions (deleting files, sending your personal information to strangers, inserting offensive text into your documents, etc.). Note that such malware is just (to use your terms) "doing things within the word processor shell itself" -- albeit things with consequences unintended by the word processor's authors.
As for condescending tones, I'd suggest that you re-read your own comments before casting aspersions on others.
--MarkusQ
Posted by: MarkusQ | October 21, 2006 at 12:43
emptypockets --
I agree wholeheartedly with the bulk of your latest comment -- in fact, I wrote something quite similar, though rather longer, over twenty years ago. The thrust of my argument then, as now, is that if we taught high school sports the way we teach high school science, it would involve a lot of reading about the history of the Olympic games and (if the students were really lucky) a lively debate about the aluminum bat problem.
But (to continue with the sports analogy) it would be just as foolish to insist that students could gain nothing from an athletic program unless they were challenging extant sprinting or long jumping records as it is to insist that there is nothing to gain in exploration that doesn't reach the frontiers of human knowledge. As it turns out, running and jumping can be great fun and very beneficial to a person's overall development, even if others routinely run faster and jump farther.
So why insist that the student's experience has to be able to teach us something about the real world that we didn't previously know? Isn't the point to teach them how to explore worlds (real or imaginary) to discover things that they didn't previously know?
I would bet, for example, that nothing you did with that widget kit on a scaffold would have surprised a seasoned electrical engineer, yet you presumably learned something from it.
I have taught a very successful micro course in the scientific method using a few dozen black plastic film canisters with the lids glued on. Each had something a little different inside (sand, sugar, water, water with a little soap, liquid soap, oil, syrup, one or more pennies, nickels, dimes, marbles, beads, and so forth). There was no chance at all that any of the students were going to learn anything we don't already know about the universe, but I can guarantee that they all learned quite a bit that they didn't already know about what it feels like to do real science.
-- MarkusQ
Posted by: MarkusQ | October 21, 2006 at 13:07
For someone in high school there was an element of discovery in dissecting a fetal pig, and I'd certainly never seen all those different sorts of algae before.
I guess I don't like the idea of using computers in labs because labs themselves are an education, the unusual apparatus and chemicals and living things, all extra-ordinary experiences. Kids can go home and do scientific stuff on a computer but labs are something different.
I don't know if the real experience of science is a realistic goal in high school labs, everything you learn then is a discovery and grappling with concepts would interfere with a "highly structured-yet-serendipitous" lab. Telling good stories about discoveries does work with high school students though.
I've seen that people are also trying to redo the college science curricula to make it more "discovery-based," this mostly seemed usuful for those students who already get what science is about. I'd say working in a lab remains the best way to discover research, people do this as early as high school.
My point really was that individuals had a very large effect on my appreciation of science, before doing research, not classwork or whatever technology was available. I'd say these people were the unexpected thing that made all the difference, as well as my remaining curious -- despite the soul chilling tyranny of grades and competition.
It is frustrating to read popular articles about science and see that the writing misses the concept, especially in the Times, but the scientific community doesn't do much to reward popular scientific efforts; even the Nobelists are verbally challenged trying to describe their own work!
Posted by: kim | October 21, 2006 at 13:23
So why insist that the student's experience has to be able to teach us something about the real world that we didn't previously know? Isn't the point to teach them how to explore worlds (real or imaginary) to discover things that they didn't previously know?
This is the crux of it. My assumption is that a student who knows he or she is just completing an exercise and trying to get the "right" answer will be bored, whether or not the answer is new to the student, because that's the kind of a brat I was at that age. On the other hand, your points are good that the electrical wiring contraption I mentioned was just new to me (not new to the world) and your canisters lesson is another good example.
Do you think the canisters lesson would be as effective as a computer simulation?
My instinct is that it depends on the real-world experience -- being able to shake them, feel them, think about doing creative things with them (what if we float them? what if we x-ray them? what if we heat them up and see how long it takes for them to cool?) that do not adapt easily to computer simulations. But I'd be interested in your take on it.
As to this:
Emptypocket's original post describes how computer simulation cannot recreate the thrill of discovery that attends doing experiments for real because the simulation program has all the results in memory before the simulation is run.
of course I was talking about the simulations used in classrooms. I've been involved with some computer software for biology that's used as part of a commercial high school kit, and in fact the way we wrote it the answers are very much hard-coded into the program. I suspect most classroom lab software is similar. In contrast, the simulators written by researchers for their own work do display emergent behavior and are used to test the consequences of their models and to make predictions about how biological systems would behave, but I think no one would take the results of a simulator to represent evidence of real biology.
This is an important point because PETA and similar groups like to argue that the research done on animals can just as effectively be done using "cell simulators" in computers, which is an out and out lie. So although we may be getting a little tech-y (and tetchy) in this discussion, the underlying question of whether you can learn new biology from a computer is an important one politically. You can't.
Posted by: emptypockets | October 21, 2006 at 13:35
kim, I completely agree that appreciating science comes down to getting to know people who have the love themselves -- all the more important to work on getting real science more popular with adults, so the kids have more chance of having it as part of their lives. On the problem of inarticulate scientists, there's an interesting New Yorker piece this week on Darwin as a writer (not online unfortunately).
Getting high school kids to work in real labs is good but there are too many of them and it is too big a time commitment (on both sides) for it be a large-scale answer. Why not bring more discovery research into the classroom? The computer revolution was built in garages (and more recently basements and dorm rooms), why hasn't biology been expanded to the hobbyist? It may not be the same kind of research you'd do in a lab, but basic genetics and behavior and development can be done with a fishtank, or some sea monkeys or a plate of bacteria for that matter. It even has advantages over 'real' research in that the questions are mostly first-principles questions rather than requiring a large background in a specific field (something that I think makes real lab work over the heads of most high-schoolers).
Posted by: emptypockets | October 21, 2006 at 13:45
Right, but the problem is the notion of "the 'right' answer", and that again has nothing to do with what tools are used to teach it. Kids can and will devote a great deal of time to exploring an open ended system, even if it isn't "real" but only simulated. They will also invest a great deal of effort to accomplish a goal if it is structured as such.
The problem is that we tell kids "do these steps, and get this result, or else" which makes it drudge work. Instead we should give them limited, partial information and make them actually work for the result, which makes it a game (and incidentally a better model of real science).
Possibly, but not likely. It was designed specifically to explore modalities, and teach the students how incomplete information from a number of different modalities (moment of inertia, sound, weight, etc.) can be combined to form a surprisingly complete picture of something that you can't see, touch, smell, etc.
Computers are better at exploring connections, interactions, and the consequences of having a moderately large number of objects in play at once.
That is not to say that you couldn't design such a lesson, just that it should probably be structured differently. One example I've seen involved a (computer simulated) kit of ramps, funnels, flip flops, etc. which the student could position to produce a "machine" into which marbles could be dropped. At first, the goal was to produce something that duplicated the (statistical) behavior of a black box device, based on clues such as timing, exit velocity and placement, etc. As a further refinement, students could construct their own black boxes with which to challenge others, attempt to construct machines from a verbal specification, or prove (inductively) that it was impossible for a machine to meet a given specification.
It doesn't sound like you were working with simulations, but rather with "teaching software" or "programed instruction software" which generally sucks. Even at the high school level there is quite a bit of useful and interesting simulation software in the life sciences (a fair amount of it free / open source) for exploring things like undirected group behavior (ants, flocks, etc.) ecological systems, ad even evolution. There is even some interesting demonstration software, such as a skeleton-morphing system that shows the underlying similarity of vertebrate skeletons and body plans by parametrically interpolating between them, chemistry visualization software for stepping through reaction mechanisms, etc.
I agree about the PETA point and the importance of basing real research on reality, although in the case of high school lab work it would be much more valuable to have the students internalize scientific thinking than to have them perform actual research. While we as a society suffer a little each time an opportunity for a discovery is missed, we suffer much more each time a child grown up to vote in total ignorance of how the people who made modern life possible think.
-- MarkusQ
Posted by: MarkusQ | October 21, 2006 at 14:41
congratulations, eureka and hallelujah -- I think we're asymptotically approaching convergence!
Posted by: emptypockets | October 21, 2006 at 15:08
The business of simulations (and whether Emptypockets' statement about everything being put in by hand was careless) is tangential to the drift of the thread, but I'd just like to state some facts in a very elementary way because it is important that the difference between simulation and experiment is understood by everyone in society; especially educators and policy makers. Markus, I hope you at least agree with the following:
In math, we decide on some axioms (statements that we take to be true without any attempt to prove them) and then work out theorems (propositions that can be proved using the axioms and prior theorems). If we were really smart, then we would know all the theorems immediately as soon as we had decided on the set of axioms, since all the theorems are implied by the axioms. Similarly, in a computer simulation, every result of that simulation is put in by hand when the program is written. We may not be smart enough to figure out what is going to come out, but it’s all there before the simulation is ever run. Cellular automata are a good example. The patterns that show up when the CA is run are often surprising because we don’t expect them based on the rules of the CA. That doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have figured out all the patterns analytically, before ever running the CA. In fact, just the opposite: every single pattern that shows up is embedded in those rules; all the information is there to understand the simulation before running it. For complex systems, though, the equations are just too hard for our limited ability at analysis. We use simulation to discover what the implications of the governing equations are.
In science we use experiments to learn about nature. Simulations are only used to explore what we *think* we know; they tell us *nothing* about nature. Indeed, they cannot tell us anything about nature; they can only tell us about our assumptions. We use simulations to explore our theories about natural phenomena and we can indeed be surprised by what we see in those simulations. But we need to be very careful to understand that what we are seeing is a result of our assumptions. We can do an experiment to see if nature behaves in a similar way to the simulation, but until we do that experiment, the simulation has only given us insight into human knowledge.
This distinction becomes important if simulations of experiments replace actual experiments in high school science. If that is as close as policy makers ever get to experimental science then they might not understand the difference. If science budgets are cut because of a belief that simulation can replace experiment, then less science would get done. There are certainly cases where simulations can reduce the number of experiments that get done, as well as cases where simulation can show that some proposed experiments are redundant, but we need to very clearly understand that simulation is only analysis and that without contact to experiment, it tells us nothing about nature.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | October 21, 2006 at 19:00
Ken, well put. I agree on all points.
I'd add that besides the simulators you have addressed, there are many analytical software packages that allow a computer to extract information from experimental data and give us a new result. But again the computer is not generating new information, and the result depends entirely on the experimental data we get in the lab. Again, computers are good for analysis but incapable of doing experimental biology.
Posted by: emptypockets | October 21, 2006 at 19:52
Ken Muldrew --
I do not agree on several points. To keep things short, I will call out a few of my more salient points of disagreement.
This used to be (a hundred years ago or so) the standard position. Based on this view, there were various attempts to prove that mathematics was complete and consistent, or even just consistent. It is remarkably hard to do, and is an open problem for most interesting axiom systems. We provisionally assume that they are consistent as a matter of pragmatics, but if they should turn out to be inconsistent we would find ourselves able to prove any well formed statement.
In any case, given the limitations of real computational entities (including hypothetical but physically possible super-duper-computers much smarter than we could ever hope to be) the vast majority of theorems in any system are computationally inaccessible--we will never know if they are true or not.
This is the antithesis of "put in by hand." Axioms are "put in by hand;" the consequences are computed.
This only applies to simulations which accept no input from the user or other external sources. This is where the word processor analogy comes in. If the user is able to mess with things (say, connect up circuit elements or design the rabbit's breding strategy) it is flat out untrue, in the same way that you would be nuts to say that "all possible novels are in there before the word processor is ever run."
Your argument is in any case self contradictory, since saying "We may not be smart enough to figure out what is going to come out" means that, perforce, the student might discover something new that nobody expected.
This is true in the same way that some churches once declared that "we use music to praise God" and then deduced that anything that didn't praise God wasn't music. Science is a way of thinking about problems that works well for understanding nature, but in by no means limited to that purpose. And if you are trying to teach people how to "do science" it is often useful to do so in a made-up world where they can't just look up "the right answer" because no one has ever been there before.
It forces them to actually think like scientists, which is the whole point of the class.
This is just as true in the field as in a simulation. I am not saying that it isn't an important point (it is) but you are incorrect if you think it only applies to simulations and that when you do an experiment in the field you are somehow seeing reality "directly" and not filtered by your assumptions.
There are a few more, but I'll skip them because I am tired and want to save a few lucid moments to comment on one point where we are basically in agreement, and differ only on the coloration.
Yes, obviously, we can not collect new data points that challenge are assumptions by only examining the results of our assumptions (although surprisingly often, simulations do turn up conflicts with previously known data that invalidate the assumptions they were based on). And if the choice were between policy makers who understood the difference and those that did not, I would be with you 100%.
However, I fear that the problem is deeper than that, and we are faced with policy makers who see science as "something they do with nature (bugs/stars/smelly goo...fill in the blank)" and don't understand that it is a process, a way of thinking, and that it is uniquely suited to addressing many of the problems we face.
To me, the thought process behind science are far more important than the specifics of subject matter.
--MarkusQ
Posted by: MarkusQ | October 21, 2006 at 22:46
Not to pick nits, but "culturing of gels" almost certainly refers to the procedure of growing cultures ON gels, such as PDY Agar, a common high school science experiment, and a method used in every bio lab that I have ever seen. While somewhat oddly phrased, it is not as rediculous or uninformed a refrence as it might seem, and certainly nowhere close to the absurdity of "the gerrymandering of PACs." That said, I agree with almost everything else in this post.
Posted by: lizard | October 22, 2006 at 12:50
EP, I think that New Yorker article you referred to is on the web, at least this seems like it after a quick skim:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061023crbo_books
Posted by: kim | October 22, 2006 at 13:50
lizard, yes, I think that is probably what they meant -- but, as you point out, they didn't say it right. It's not that they got the facts fundamentally wrong, but more of a shibboleth that indicates to me they are not part of the science tribe. But you're right, it's not nearly as bad as the older fellow I once knew who railed against scientists today "splitting genes up and down the highway!" (I could only guess he was conflating splitting the atom, modifying genes, and the "information superhighway" of the mid-90s.)
kim, I saw that one but it's not the Darwin one -- I wish the New Yorker would put everything online, but they pick and choose. The Darwin one is called "Rewriting Nature" by Adam Gopnik, and is filed under their "Life and Letters" heading (not under critics). Check your local library or dentist's waiting room for the issue with Mets pitcher on the cover, but here's a couple excerpts transcribed to give you the flavor:
"Darwin was not a writer just by inclination; he was, uniquely among the great scientists, an author by trade. His books, even some of the most technical ones, were published by a commercial publisher, and he was subject to the same trials as other writers: editors who cut too much, royalty statements that show too little. And Wilson's collection, read right through, shows that Darwin really was one of the great natural English prose stylists. He wasn't a "poet" in that vaguely humane sense of someone who has a nice way with an image; he was a man who knew how to cast his thesis into a succession of incidents, so that action and argument become one. And, as with all good writing, the traces of a lifetime's struggles for sense and sanity remain on the page. Reading Darwin as a writer shows us a craftsman of enormous resource and a lot of quiet mischief. But it can also remind us that recent efforts to humanize him -- to assure readers that the truth is not so hard to take; that Darwinism does not expel us into a void of cold chance -- are unnecessary. The most humane and poetic side of Darwinism is already there, because he put it there when he wrote it down.
[...]
Darwin's strategy was one of the greatest successes in the history of rhetoric, so much so that we are scarcely now aware that it was a strategy. His pose of open-mindedness and ostentatiously asserted country virtue [such as his chapters on pigeon fanciers] made him, in his way, as unassailable as George Washington. The notion persists to this day that Darwin was a circumspect observer of animals, not a confident theorist of life... Darwin was humble and modest in exactly the way that Inspector Columbo is. He knows from the beginning who the guilty party is, and what the truth is, and would rather let the bad guys hang themselves out of arrogance and overconfidence, while he walks around in his raincoat, scratching his head and saying, "Oh, yeah -- just one more thing about that six-thousand-year-old Earth, Reverend Snodgrass...""
I love that last line.
Posted by: emptypockets | October 22, 2006 at 16:29
I'll look for the article, it does sound good... if it involves EO Wilson a more robust Columbo (with a firebomb?) comes to mind.
Posted by: jerry | October 22, 2006 at 18:34
Make that "kim," I'm confusing my soapboxes again.
Posted by: kim | October 22, 2006 at 18:39
Re: Biotech hobbyists, The Economist magazine had a great article about garage biotechs a few weeks ago:
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SRVQPNS
The initial investment actually isn't large, I hadn't thought of biotech as a hobby before reading the article, but the initial investment hurdle is fairly small... sounds like real fun!
Posted by: kim | October 22, 2006 at 23:31
thanks, I'll take a look -- subscription only but I get it at home (just can't remember my login for the website) so I'll look for it in print. At one point I was fooling with building a yeast genetics box for the home hobbyist, seeing how well you could grow them on kitchenware (a little sugar, a little nitrogen source, some gelatin...). Also recently picked up a book on genetics & mating behavior of guppies, seems like another nice system for the hobbyist. Neither of those is exactly biotech though... closer to Darwin's pigeon-fanciers than to the computer revolution.
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