Towards better STEM content
extremely better

Highlights

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Remembering Sizes 2015.
Here's a way to remember the sizes of things, from planets to atoms.
OoM Torque.
Get a feel for torque. Multi-scale stories about twisting. What does a Newton-meter of torque look like? A bottle cap!
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Scientific expertise is not broadly distributed.
If access to it matters for educational content creation, then a major effort will be required of the science research community.
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Zooming Viewer.
Get a feel for scale. Customize with your own content. [This is the old one. The new version isn't up yet].
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History shown with days as dots.
So centuries fit on a screen. An interactive app.
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Also

Fun stuff.
Comics, interactives, videos, talks, papers, and other fun stuff.
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"What color is the Sun?" - an example of science education pathology.
A 5-year-old asks "What color is the Sun?". Astronomy graduate students get it wrong. Why? K-graduate, content needs better experts.
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Crust thickness of anywhere.
How thick is the crust under your feet? An interactive demo of the CRUST2.0 dataset.
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A simple paleoglobe.
An interactive globe of Earth's past.
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More

"Social-computing" for content creation.
Dramatically altering the cost and plausibility of expert-intensive content creation.
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Zoomable micrographs.
Lots of folks have nice micrographs sitting offline. Lots of students need a better sense of scale. And less wretched science content. Are there opportunities here?
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"What is flame?" - a contest entry.
My entry in the SUNY 'Flame Challenge' - "explain flame to an 11-year-old" - annotated to point out some content design ideas.
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Opportunities

A vocabulary for describing uncertainty.
Thorough descriptions require variously saying "we're not sure yet" much more than usual. Accessibly - graduate to primary.
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Misc

Molecular capsules for teaching organic chemistry.
Capsules isolate a couple of molecules in a box. Permitting simpler stories.
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What are landmarks & landscapes?
Helping develop a rough-quantitative feel for the physical world.
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Mineral diversification.
Surface minerology stories integrating chemistry, planetary geology, and biology.
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Perspicuous display of exponential notation.
Important bits big, not tiny. 4.56 × 102 versus 102×4.56
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News

2016-11
Scientific expertise is not broadly distributed.
2015-12
Remembering Sizes 2015.
2014-12
OoM Torque.
2013-04
Perspicuous display of exponential notation.
2013-04
Mineral diversification.
2013-04
What are landmarks & landscapes?
2013-04
Zooming Viewer.
2013-02
Molecular capsules for teaching organic chemistry.
2013-02
Zoomable micrographs.
2013-02
History shown with days as dots.
2012-12
"What color is the Sun?" as education pathology.
2012-11
"Social-computing" for content creation.
2012-11
A vocabulary for describing uncertainty.
2012-11
"What is flame?" - a contest entry.
2012-04
Site up.

Expectation management

This site is in early development.

I'm hoping to flesh it out summer 2012 over the next year or two.

What is this site?

Consider the stories we tell about the physical world.
Descriptive content, for science and engineering education, K-graduate.
How excellent could they become?
Have we been aiming way too low? Eating ingredients separately, instead of cooking them? Could content be a mind-blowing distillation of powerful moments from many thousands of good research talks?
This site is me drafting some arguments.
If the scope were narrower, one might imagine it as the sketch of a position paper, circulated for comment. But the scope is part of the argument, the collaboration needed is big and diverse, and text isn't enough without software and web. So it's a website.
You can help.
Leaving a comment for me is easy. Every page has a
Mark it up!
button (bottom right) -- click it, type anywhere on the page, click it again, and I'll see your markups. For questions, comments, pointers to literature, whatever. And there are the usual email, blog and social links. Also, I mention speculative opportunities for separable work, which someone might be interested in taking on.
You can copy.
My own code and content, are MIT and CC-BY-SA. There is vastly more that needs doing, than I'll live to get to. And the world's "missed opportunities in education" pipeline moves at 2.5 million new students per week.
Enjoy.
Upon mouse-over, links are shown in preview on the right, to make surfing faster. Some of the demos are fun. And there are links to nice comics, videos, talks, and papers.

Key ideas

Overview

  • Clarifying insight... from better experts.
  • K-graduate... because the hard part is upstream.
  • Rough-quantitative... active learning?
  • Content improvements... are very not independent.
  • Tasty low-hanging fruit... abundant & neglected.

Focus

Overview

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