| Course Description: Purpose of the Course |
This is an interdisciplinary science course which focuses intensely on four key concepts:
Motion and mechanical forces
Electricity and circuits
Materials and their properties
Solar system
These topics have been selected because they are central to an understanding of the scientific topics that affect our daily lives and understanding of the world around us. In spite of what you may have been taught, science is not an accumulation of dry, disconnected trivial facts. It is organized common sense, an evolving and changing way of understanding the world around us, of making sense of what we see, hear, and learn from experiments.
Purpose of the Course:
This course is designed to fulfill the science component of the general education requirements. The objectives of the course, then, are related to the objectives of the general education requirements themselves. Successful students in this course will learn what science is, how scientists understand the universe and its contents, how science improves our understanding of everyday events, such as traffic accidents and water pollution, and how this understanding changes our lives.
Why is it important that an educated person learn about science?
An educated person, in order to function as an employee, citizen, and
worthwhile human being in today's world, needs to be familiar with a number
of areas of human knowledge as well as to have some skills. Virtually
every University in America recognizes this fact and has some set of general
education or "core" requirements. However, according to surveys, Delaware
students revealed a surprising amount of ignorance about the objectives
of these requirements. Why is there general education?
Why does an educated person need to know something about science and technology?
Some generalities about science and technology literacy: Many events in the contemporary political and industrial world deal with science and technology. Some examples are the issue of economic competitiveness, the greenhouse effect, the threat to the ozone layer, the explosive growth of the personal computer and its cousin, the internet. Someone who wishes to be an informed citizen or informed politician needs to know what the scientific view of the world is, what technology is (and how it is related to, but not identical to, science), and how technological innovation takes place.
What we hope you will do, after taking this course, is to have an interest in science for your lifetime. We hope you will occasionally look at some of the science specials which appear on television from time to time (especially the NOVA series on PBS). We hope that you will read one of the general interest science magazines (Scientific American, Science News, and Discover; Omni includes some science and some science fiction, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.) We hope that as a parent (or schoolteacher if you become one), you will enjoy communicating the excitement and beauty of science to kids.
"Narrower Yet Deeper; Less Is More"
In the past ten years many reports have stated that the American educational system is in crisis. One widely proposed solution in science education is to "cover" fewer concepts but go into depth on the ones you do cover. We seek an understanding of some of the deeper concepts which underlie our understanding of nature, our comprehension of the Universe, and of some of the major physical concepts which affect our lives.
That is why we will focus our learning around the four major topics listed above.