Technology and Computing
This story originally featured on Mel Magazine. Deep within the recesses of the Department of Health and Human Services, your embarrassingly slow one-mile run time from high school is collecting dust somewhere. Okay, truthfully, whether or not your sluggish mile time actually made its way to Washington, D.C. has a lot to do with reporting procedures. It also has a lot to do with the era in which you attended high school. And it has a lot to do with…
This story originally appeared in the Youth issue of Popular Science. Current subscribers can access the whole digital edition here, or click here to subscribe. Li Xin Zhang’s summer camp began with sandwiches—not eating them but designing them. The rising seventh grader listened as teachers asked her and her peers to write instructions for building the ideal peanut butter, jelly, and bread concoction. Heads down, the students each created their own how-to. When they returned to the Zoom matrix of digital faces and…
The following is an excerpt from Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America by Katie Worth. A middle-schooler who thumbed through the pages of iScience—a textbook that as of 2018 sat on the shelves of a quarter of American middle-school science classrooms—could be forgiven for closing the book with some big questions about recent climate change. At the start of an eight-page section devoted to the subject, she would read that, “Average temperatures on Earth have been increasing for…
Luke Porter / UnsplashThe internet is filled to the brim with opportunities to learn new things. But even if you have the willpower to push forward without the direct guidance of a teacher, it’s hard to dedicate the five to ten hours a week a lot of these courses require to stay on track. Plus, without regular positive feedback, your initial motivation could take a quick nosedive.This is why apps like Duolingo are so wildly popular. The app constantly praises…
Thanks to a lack of digital back-ups, an estimated $5 billion in student loan debt could essentially disappear. Last month, the New York Times reported on a series of lawsuits brought by financial institutions against former students who have defaulted on their loans. Some of the suits were dismissed, and all of the student’s debt erased, because important physical documents proving loan ownership had gone missing. No one can prove who owns the loans, meaning a judge can rule the student doesn’t…
Let's be clear about science education and engagement science In last week's blog piece "The public don't want to be involved in science policy" Hannah Baker used the recent Wellcome Trust Monitor Survey to argue that rather than involving the public in decisions around science, we need to be focusing on … Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They're Hard science The researchers found that while math and science majors drew the most interest initially, not many students finished with…