The nature of Science. A very interesting module. I never actually found myself sitting and thinking about Science, the history of it, what it is, whats the difference between Science and History. These are questions that actually really stirred my thinking as I went through the lecture slides and read through the responses from other classmates of mine on the question: What is Science? As I have mentioned, I never really gave it a thought until the question was actually directed to me. Reading the various responses posted by fellow classmates of mine actually gave me a rather concrete understanding of what Science actually is. It can be said to be the study of nature, the environment and how things around us occur through various experiments and research. Another interesting thing I learnt was the difference between Science and Pseudoscience. I never knew there was such a word as “Pseudoscience”. From what I understand, I will say that Pseudoscience is basically, non-evidential and gibberish science.
Although I have gained some interesting knowledge, I believe that I will need to read and research much more to gain more knowledge on what Science truly is and how it affects my daily life and the environment which will cause the knowledge I gain to be meaningful and understandable to me.
Teaching Science to young kids is truly a challenging task. It takes a lot of passion and confidence in order to be able to teach them as they are very curious and expect evidence such as having a visual representation before believing anything. Therefore, I think that providing the opportunity to kids to conduct simple experiments, show them videos or even getting them to observe the result of an experiment as I as the teacher conducts it would be thoroughly beneficial, engaging and meaningful to my future students. If experiments are to tedious to conduct, showing videos of how the experiment is conducted or how a process takes place such a how a butterfly is formed or how plants grow are some examples of processes that can’t be shown in class but through interactive videos from online resources, students will get the opportunity to understand the process in the most detailed form available. Thus, a teacher’s time, effort and creativity is of the utmost importance to ensure effective and meaningful teaching and learning takes place.
Various examples on pseudoscience
A website that defines Science very interestingly :)