Post #1779055

2026-03-10 18:11 UTC

@HGourlayUCL I think one of the most important things we should resurrect and develop is the idea of solving problems by estimation; the Fermi approach. It is a skill for life that needs to sit alongside making up solutions and concentrations. It's not very sexy but you can take articles out of the newspaper every day and try to make sense of chemistry, physics and more just by running some arithmetic and powers of ten. Accuracy and precision can then follow further down the road.

Replies (3)

@martinvermeer@fediscience.org 2026-03-11 09:10

@sellathechemist @HGourlayUCL This is true. And it protects you from dumb mistakes. Like, my students doing the Eratosthenes thing and finding the radius of the Earth is 6000 m... Or, this https://fediscience.org/@martinvermeer/116192911250750242

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@sellathechemist@mastodon.social 2026-03-11 11:02

@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer But jsut to continue with this thought, there is so much confusion over significant figures. Schools need to get a grip on this because different subjects/boards put the focus on sig figs or decimal places. Many teachers too are not confident about this, in my view, or rather the deeper meaning of the digits quoted. These are crucial components of critical thinking that need to be built in very early and not left for university teachers to sort out.

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@SusiArnott@mastodon.green 2026-03-12 08:27

@sellathechemist @HGourlayUCL Had an 'orders of magnitude' exercise in my #carbonliteracy courses for just this reason (didn't call it that! But a shockingly useful recap of units, tens, hundreds and so forth in a picturecard sorting game:)

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