The Developing Scientist as Craftsperson

Increasingly, the day-to-day practice of science education is pervaded by the presence of computational media. Simulations, modelling tools, and virtual laboratories have become the stock in trade of the up-to-date science educator; and consequently the young scientist is a person who, more and more, spends a large proportion of his or her time in abstract and nonphysical "worlds". This move toward an increasingly virtualized science education has important benefits for some scientific domains and for some activities: it is arguably only through the simulation of especially complex systems that the student can get a sense of how such systems are capable of behaving. Moreover, the real, physical world constrains us as human beings— and perhaps it constrains our scientific imaginations as well. We cannot easily experience the frictionless environments that would make many principles of Newtonian mechanics more intuitive [White and Horwitz 1987; diSessa 1982]; we do not grasp the behavior of objects moving at speeds near that of light [Horwitz 1994]; we do not see firsthand the evolution of ecosystems, a phenomenon perhaps best understood at a time-scale of millennia [Dawkins 1996]. In all these cases, the building and studying of virtual worlds, of simulations, of abstract models, is plausibly a crucial step in the education of the scientist.