(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
I happen to come across this post from 2011 that I like so much, I thought I’d say it again:
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 teaching the students some programming language that can do simulation and graphics. (R is a little clunky and Matlab is not open-source. Maybe Python?)
After the warm-up, students can program simulations each week:
– Physics: simulation of bouncing billiard balls, atomic decay, etc.
– 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.
There could be lecture material connecting these simulations with relevant scientific models. This could be great!
P.S. For a few years Columbia College had a science core course, which was described like this:
On Mondays throughout the semester, four [science faculty] present mini-series of three lectures each. 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.
Seems a bit bogus to me. What kind of experiments are these students really going to plan and conduct? And, sure, debate the implications of the most recent scientific discoveries all you want, but I don’t think you’ll learn so much about science that way.
I much prefer my idea of the computer simulation course. And, just to be clear, it’s not a computing course (although, sure, the students will learn a lot of computing), it’s a science course. On the computer they’d be simulating real scientific phenomena such as gravity, evolution, etc. That would be important. I’m not talking about a statistics or machine learning course, valuable as that would be on its own terms. The computing here is a means to getting a better understanding of science. I’d bet a student will learn a lot more about evolution, chemical reactions, entropy, etc., by simulating these processes than by running live experiments, reading old books and articles by famous scientists, or seeing lots of math.
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