Home / Teaching and Learning
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Ilias and I have been talking about papers each week. Most recently, we read Platt’s Strong Inference paper about the scientific method and Doug Fudge’s engaging 50-year anniversary essay about it. What are some articles that are great for new graduate students should read? This is a rough list-in-progress… Stephen C. Stearns “Designs for... More
On Saturday, I took part as a mentor in National Learn to Code Day with Ladies Learning Code. There were about 50 learners of all ages. The topic was “Using Data to Solve Problems: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Beginners”, led by Solmaz Shahalizadeh, the data team directory at Shopify in Ottawa.... More
I just read a great post by Jessica Duarte on teaching beginners to code. It is all so true. Especially #5, making mistakes: You [the instructor] have to ride out the mistakes. Make them often. Let the class fix them. It’s essential for students to see and experience the process of working through mistakes. Right... More
Behavioural ecology has long focused on “the evolutionary basis for animal behaviour due to ecological pressures”. With decades of work now showing that foraging, aggression, mating, and cooperation are elegantly adapted, why should we keep studying behaviour? I think there are several reasons. First, we often don’t know how behaviours... More
My 10-month old daughter just proved that she understands some words. Now, when we tell her to “clap your hands”, or even just talk about clapping, we get a round of applause. Pretty cute! This wasn’t one of the things we were actively trying to teach her, like “daddy”, “mommy”, “dog”, or “milk” –... More
The scientific method is taught as far back as elementary school. But students almost never get to experience what I think is the best part: what you do when something goes wrong. That’s too bad because self-correction is a hallmark of science. In ecology and evolution, most graduate students don’t get to experience iteration... More
Yesterday I was asked about how I mentor in research. This is an area where I still have a lot to learn, however, there are at least four things that I think are really important: 1. Confidence**. Instilling confidence is probably the most important thing a mentor can do. Science is about unknowns and... More
Last week, I posted a quote by Alison Gopnik about the strange state of science education, here. It may seem obvious in hindsight, but there is data to back this up: students benefit from actually doing science. What’s more, it is possible to achieve this for fairly large numbers of 1st year undergraduates. Typically, this type... More
From Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter: Imagine if we taught baseball the way we teach science. Until they were twelve, children would read about baseball technique and history, and occasionally hear inspirational stories of the great baseball players. They would fill out quizzes about baseball rules. College undergraduates might... More
One of the best things about maternity leave is watching my daughter learn new things, almost daily. A few weeks ago she realized she could control her feet. This week she’s using her hands to grab at objects and starting to pull them in for further, mouth-based inspection. It really is exponential – the... More
This is from a session I did with the UBC R Study Group. Loops can be convenient for applying the same steps to big/distributed datasets, running simulations, and writing your own resampling/bootstrapping analyses. Here are some ways to make them faster. 1. Don’t grow things in your loops. 2. Vectorize where possible. i.e. pull... More
I’ve been going to a graduate class in science communication this semester. Doug taught us the rule that if you’re using a bar graph, the y axis must start at 0. Otherwise you end up with trickery like this: Fox News continues charting excellence. From flowingdata.com In bar graphs, area communicates magnitude. Change the lower... More
Search