Category Archives: School and Education

“… and you just type whatever I say without thinking…”

The New York Times: Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting.. By Susan Dynarski.

“In a series of experiments at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, students were randomly assigned either laptops or pen and paper for note-taking at a lecture. Those who had used laptops had substantially worse understanding of the lecture, as measured by a standardized test, than those who did not.
[…]
Most college students are legal adults who can serve in the armed forces, vote and own property. Why shouldn’t they decide themselves whether to use a laptop?

The strongest argument against allowing that choice is that one student’s use of a laptop harms the learning of students around them.
[…]
The best evidence available now suggests that students should avoid laptops during lectures and just pick up their pens. It’s not a leap to think that the same holds for middle and high school classrooms, as well as for workplace meetings.”

Link via MetaFilter.

“Jeder einzelne hat eine Stimme”

Deutsche Welle: Emilia S.: Mut zum Widerspruch. “Sie hat sich gegen Antisemitismus an ihrer Schule in Dresden stark gemacht: Mit nur 15 Jahren erhält eine Schülerin einen Preis für Zivilcourage.”

Dazu gibt es auch ein Video: Schülerin aus Dresden geht gegen antisemitische Hetze vor.

“Eine Schülerin aus Dresden wollte den wachsenden Antisemitismus an ihrer Schule nicht mehr hinnehmen und erstattete Anzeige gegen einen Mitschüler wegen Volksverhetzung. Für ihre Zivilcourage wurde sie nun mit einem Preis ausgezeichnet.”

“I was appalled by the number of people affected by lead contamination in water.”

NPR the two-way: Troubled By Flint Water Crisis, 11-Year-Old Girl Invents Lead-Detecting Device.

“Gitanjali Rao, 11, says she was appalled by the drinking water crisis in Flint, Mich. — so she designed a device to test for lead faster. She was named “America’s Top Young Scientist” on Tuesday at the 3M Innovation Center in St. Paul, Minn.”

When adding a third filter lets through MORE light

3Blue1Brown with minutephysics: Some light quantum mechanics. “This is a simple primer for how the math of quantum mechanics, specifically in the context of polarized light, relates to the math of classical waves, specifically classical electromagnetic waves.”

minutephysics with 3Blue1Brown: Bell’s Theorem: The Quantum Venn Diagram Paradox. “This video is about Bell’s Theorem, one of the most fascinating results in 20th century physics. Even though Albert Einstein (together with collaborators in the EPR Paradox paper) wanted to show that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because it was nonlocal (he didn’t like “spooky action at a distance”), John Bell managed to prove that any local real hidden variable theory would have to satisfy certain simple statistical properties that quantum mechanical experiments (and the theory that describes them) violate. Since then, GHZ and others have managed to extend the theoretical work, and Alain Aspect performed the first Bell test experiment in the late 1980s.”