I love a good science center.

One of my favorite reads is K.C. Cole’s “Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and His Astonishing Exploratorium.”  At first it’s a biography of Frank Oppenheimer growing up in the shadow of his “cerebral” older brother J. Robert through the Manhattan Project years, becoming faculty at Minnesota only to be exiled during McArthyism — all of which is essential context to explain how San Francisco’s Exploratorium came to be the seminal science and discovery center in the world. Some of Frank’s values that defined the space that have stuck with me are: 1) admission should always be … » More …

Nature published a piece today that’s relevant to several of my discussions on this blog: “Why we are teaching science wrong, and how to make it right.” In short, it’s a demonstration of exactly what is wrong with the new active education movement. Let me be very clear that my negativity does not mean that I’m against the movement — active learning is indeed an advance over the status quo. This larger national movement is simply a small step in the right direction, one that can easily be skipped over towards the inevitable future of STEM education.

The article advocates gimmick in-class discussion problems. … » More …

Consider this cherry tree in the WSU Arboretum:

While a great view for enjoying Ferdinand’s ice cream, this tree can also teach about the design and evolution of complex systems. Why does the tree branch the way it does? Why does it branch in similar ways as these?

The image on the left is a river delta, the image on the … » More …

What is education for? –is a question too seldom asked and posed by Seth Godin in this fantastic TED-x talk and discussed in his open-access manifesto on education.

Here’s my opinion: education is for fostering the traits needed by humanity. As such, what education is for must continue to evolve with humanity. Humanity’s needs in the 18th century are very different from the needs of today. Humanity’s needs in the 1950’s, when Bloom originally posited his taxonomy of learning, are more similar yet still different–and continue towards obsolescence–from the needs of today. So why are Bloom’s values still the gold standard of engineering academia?

… » More …

… increasingly a difficult question to answer.

I’ve flipped both of my classes to varying degrees this semester. As one of my seniors in Applied Rocket Design put it, “Many professors say they’ve flipped a class, but most of what we students actually do remains the same. You’ve forced things to be very different and that in itself has been valuable.”

I replaced faculty structured lectures with student team originated design reviews… let’s be clear, the students decide what aspect of their rocket designs to present about for ~40 minutes, examples are posted under the teaching link. Feedback/scores come from their peers via an online … » More …

WSU is gearing up for a 2nd attempt at running a TEDx event. I was lucky enough to give a talk at last year’s event:

In the process of researching and developing the talk, I dreamed up an interesting question: If TED is indeed where conventional wisdom goes to die, and TED becomes conventional wisdom, then what happens to TED?

While the question was posed in fun, and TED talks are a lot of fun, there is a serious side to this. TED does indeed have it’s own » More …