What can science teachers do to elevate interest in their classes and make learning more exciting and fun? This is an age-old question that educators have been grappling with forever. It is commonly assumed and studies have verified that students learn more if they are actively involved in the learning experience. Anything the teacher can do to peak interest in a subject pays rich rewards. It is common sense that if a student is enjoying a learning experience, that student will put more effort into the experience. J. L. Smith taught high school and college physics for thirty-five years. In that time he developed a teaching style that that achieved great success. Anecdotal comments from his former students express their positive attitudes towards his physics classes. One major ingredient in Mr. Smith's approach to teaching physics was his emphasis on demonstrations that were thought-provoking, awesome and right-down fun. If a teacher can get the student's attention and stroke the thinking process, success will soon follow. In this offering J. L. Smith describes fifty demonstrations that he has used over the years in his physics classes. Though designed for the physics classroom, Mr. Smith's attitude and approach to the demonstrations could be extended to many disciplines of education. His techniques developed in the physics classroom will work in many other settings. J. L. Smith is also author of the stand-alone science fiction novel, Adam. His understanding in the field of physics is obvious. It is hoped that this offering will make the teaching of physics specifically, and science in general, more student-friendly and quite simply, fun.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.
Noted science writer Chet Raymo explores how we found our place in space and time, and what it has meant to humankind. In Walking Zero, Chet Raymo uses the Prime Meridian—the line of zero longitude and the standard for all the world's maps and clocks—to tell the story of humandkind's intellectual journey from a cosmos not much larger than ourselves to the universe of the galaxies and geologic eons. As in his highly praised The Path and Climbing Brandon, Raymo connects personally with the story by walking England's Prime Meridian from Brighton through Greenwich to the North Sea. The Prime Meridian passes near a surprising number of landmarks that loom large in science: Isaac Newton's chambers at Trinity College, Cambridge; Charles Darwin's home at Down, in Kent; the site where the first dinosaur fossils were discovered; and John Harrison's clocks in a museum room of the Royal Observatory, among many others. Visiting them in turn, Raymo brings to life the human dramas of courageous individuals who bucked reigning orthodoxies to expand our horizons, including one brave rebel who paid the ultimate price for surmising the multitude of worlds we now take for granted. A splendid short history of astronomy and geology, Walking Zero illuminates the startling interplay of science, psychology, faith, and the arts in our understanding of space and time.
