Reply to comment

So, this semester I am taking Introduction to Computing to fill my quantitative requirement. After having read these articles I guess I felt that I could really relate with much of what was said in them. I'm not a math person. I'm not really a science person either, though I was able to do really well in physics through out my entire high school science experience, which was pretty intensive. The Comp Sci class that I am taking right now is very different from how it was taught in previous years. This year each student is given a robot which we program ourselves. This has proven to be extremely helpful because I am able to see the results that I produce and can understand them. Ex) if I write a program and command the robot to go forward, and it doesn't work. There is something that I did wrong in the command that I typed. (this does get much more complicated as we start writing different mathematically related formulas)

I guess I mainly wanted to discuss the idea of how science is taught in life. Whitten and Burciaga introduce in their article, this idea of being active with the sciences as opposed to actively listening. It seems that most institutions of education in the sciences are only starting to cater to the education needs of marginalized groups in the class room! This is a wonderful thing to me this idea of active listening is proving to be less and less successful it seems for people to grasp. However i continue to worry about the idea that people are going to see specialized science programs as some sort of science special Ed. Not that special ED is bad in any way shape or form, though I just worry that there will be a stigma connected to this way of teaching.