SellaTheChemistMar 10
Interesting view from Peter Atkins at the RSC Historial Group - don't tell students that there's a lot of hard maths in chemistry. He argues that there's not a lot of real mathematics. There are a lot of physical ideas that are underpinned quantitatively. Tell students instead to focus on the ideas, and that the maths is easy and will follow.
Lovely account of the growth of PChem in the last 50 years, in part illustrated by acronyms used in his textbooks. Fascinating.
Show threadHGourlayUCLMar 10
@sellathechemist Do you think the high school curriculum would do better to focus on concepts? Leave the maths to the maths teachers and programmes, and have chemistry (or in my case physics) teachers focus on the chemistry (or physics)? #chemistryeducation #physicseducation
Show threadSellaTheChemistMar 10
@HGourlayUCL I think one of the most important things we should resurrect and develop is the idea of solving problems by estimation; the Fermi approach. It is a skill for life that needs to sit alongside making up solutions and concentrations.
It's not very sexy but you can take articles out of the newspaper every day and try to make sense of chemistry, physics and more just by running some arithmetic and powers of ten.
Accuracy and precision can then follow further down the road.
Show threadMartin Vermeer FCD

@sellathechemist @HGourlayUCL This is true. And it protects you from dumb mistakes. Like, my students doing the Eratosthenes thing and finding the radius of the Earth is 6000 m...

Or, this

https://fediscience.org/@martinvermeer/116192911250750242

Mar 11 at 9:10amWeb
Show threadHGourlayUCLMar 11
@martinvermeer @sellathechemist Yes, or a close member of my family calculating that a satellite was in orbit at a height burrowing just below the Earth's surface.
Show threadSellaTheChemistMar 11
@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer Maybe they were thinking of Elon Musk's mole of satellites.
Show threadMartin Vermeer FCDMar 11
@sellathechemist @HGourlayUCL But seriously, in aerial mapping I have run into the situation where there are two solutions for the location of the mapping aircraft that the iterative (gradient descent) solving of the observation equations converges to, where one of them is underground. One should be able to notice that and choose only the physically realistic alternative...
Show threadSellaTheChemistMar 11
@martinvermeer @HGourlayUCL I do four workshops with life science students on estimation. Some love it. Some absolutely hate the fact that I don't really care what the "right answer" is and cannot get their head round the idea that it's an approach, a process, not a result.
Maybe they'll thank me 10 years from now.