News by Subject Education

Playing a Pokémon-like card game about ecology and biodiversity can result in broader knowledge of species and a better understanding of ecosystems than traditional teaching methods, like slideshows, according to new research from the University of British Columbia.

Microfluidics and learning-on-a-chip research -- involving the manipulation of small amounts of fluids to run miniaturized experiments -- are a prolific research field. But there aren't yet many published examples of how to teach it in an easily understandable way or to communicate advances within the field to the public. In Biomicrofluidics, researchers present a review of published literature about microfluidics education and provide methods and suggestions for improving microfluidics teachings and outreach.

Pictures of the earth's water cycle used in education and research throughout the world are in urgent need of updating to show the effects of human interference, according to new analysis by an international team of hydrology experts.

Scientists unravelling the mysteries of star cluster formation have taken inspiration from a 19th century magic trick, to help explain their work to the public. Researchers from the University of Leeds have developed 3D holograms that allow people to watch massive stars forming before their eyes and will be demonstrating their work at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting on July 2, 2019.

As students learn a new concept, measuring how well they grasp it has often depended on traditional paper and pencil tests. Dartmouth researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm, which can be used to measure how well a student understands a concept based on his or her brain activity patterns. The findings are published in Nature Communications. The study is one of the first to look at how knowledge learned in school is represented in the brain.

Mountains have character. The continuous gentle, wavy hills and wide valleys of the Carpathians, Appalachians or lower parts of the Alps contrast strongly with the soaring peaks, ragged ridges and deep ravines of the high Tatra mountains and Pyrenees, which are, in turn, different from the inaccessible, snow-covered Himalayan or Andean giants, along whose slopes flow long tongues of glaciers instead of water. Beneath this great diversity, however, lies a surprisingly similar structure.