MORE IN THE NEWS -- HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO GET TO TATOOINE? On an early autumn morning in 2009, Randall Munroe, a NASA physicist turned full-time cartoonist, was teaching a weekend physics class to high-school students in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The course was part of an M.I.T. program designed to introduce students to topics ranging from sculpture and ancient Greek to geoengineering. Though Munroe’s lecture that day had the lively title “Solar Panels, Hand Grenades, and Blowing Up the Moon: How to Think About Energy,” for the first hour and a half he adhered to a fairly standard lecture format. Halfway through his lecture, Munroe decided to shift tactics. Veering away from the traditional classroom approach, he began illustrating concepts with zany examples. What if, for instance, the students had to sort out the energy dynamics of a scene in “Star Wars” or “The Lord of the Rings”? “Suddenly, the kids were excited and engaged,” he told me.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 18:25:04 +0000
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