Sent to CCL by: steinbrt+/-rci.rutgers.edu
Dear CCLers,
while we are veering far away from computational into philosophical
territory here, I would like to add my two cents to this and hope to get
some feedback from people with more experience teaching science.
science and encourage young people (e.g., high-school students) to learn
more. Moreover, we want to break the existing attitude that science is
boring and unattractive. Science is fun and doing science is cool - this
is the most important message of the film.
While I liked your movie, I dont believe that this is a good impression to
convey to new or prospective students. It only sets them up for inevitable
disappointment when they find out that doing and learning science is not
really fun, but tedious, hard and often boring work (no one who ever
debugged parallel code could disagree...) I don't want to depreciate my
own profession, because obviously the results of doing research are worth
every bit of effort. As an analogy, the Golden Gate Bridge surely is
impressive, but I don't think it was fun to build.
Wouldn't it be more important to try to make students see the big picture,
i.e. that mastering the skills of a scientist, while a huge investment of
time and nerves, will 'pay off' in the end?
Kind Regards,
Dr. Thomas Steinbrecher
Institut für physikalische Chemie
Albertstr. 23a
79108 Freiburg>