Bringing "science" into computer science, especially for students of a non-scientific community
How do you teach scientific spirit to members of a community who can, at best, be described as "consumers" of science. After all, Pakistan isn't exactly known for it's scientific contributions, around the world. University students are consumers of the products of scientific enterprise, and what's worse is that its university professors are the consumers of the scientific enterprise itself. Science is valuable only to the degree that publishing just another brick in the wall can get an assistant professor closer to being an associate. The negative connotation and meaning that the term experiment has managed to acquire within our society is a glaring sign of the sorry state of scientific "market" in Pakistan.
I teach computer science subjects to undergraduate level students who have only experienced this consumer-based social reality. Computer science students have had to perform natural science experiments (Physics and Chemistry related) in their school and college laboratories. But the spirit in which those experiments are conducted, do you think that the students are able to extract out the basic principles of scientific inquiry and develop life-long habits of hypothesizing, experimentation, theorizing etc? Are they able to connect the dots between the findings inside a beaker and the way-of-life outside of it? Can one be scientific inside a lab and absolutely unscientific outside its confines?
If the broken scientific training wasn't damaging enough, what do you think is in store for the engineering students who then choose computer science for their future? "How is computer science a science in the first place?" I often ask my students! What's the science in learning how to code in Python or C++? But more importantly, how do the years of a student spent in attending an array of computer science courses provide a good training ground for the development of life-long social habits for scientific inquiry - a much needed training that results in a positive individual and societal internalization for the processes of hypothesizing, experimentation and theorizing?
End of part 1..
Verification Engineer | Teacher | Trainer. I'm enabling Pakistan to do world class work for global semiconductor industry.
6 年https://youtu.be/BvkBlpfbFJM
Senior software Engineer in Australian Bureau of Statistics Canberra
8 年"Science is valuable only to the degree that publishing just another brick in the wall can get an assistant professor closer to being an associate." Good one mate, your students must be lucky to have you
Helping Companies Build Products That Retain & Grow Users | Product-Led Growth Strategist | Director of Product Studio at Devsinc
8 年I think teaching exploration and to question science, instead of science itself could make students think in and outside of class in the same way. I remember being taught the definition of hypothesis, instead of how to make one.
Student, Advisor, Mentor, Trustee, Partner.
8 年Good questions about the gaps in our science education.
Software Engineer
8 年"I often ask my students! What's the science in learning how to code in Python or C++?". I guess that's the reason why most of the esteemed scientists call it an art?