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NASA Astronomer Promotes More Mathematics in Teaching

 

June 9, 2011

NASA astronomer Sten Odenwald is a successful educator. The site he's created, Space Math @ NASA, is an online educational program helping students understand the connections with math in their every day lives.

Now in its eighth year, nearly 4-million math problems have been downloaded from the site. In a recent interview, Odenwald, who works at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said math is often overlooked in the classroom.

“Through most grade school science courses except perhaps physics, you never get very much mathematics as part of your astronomy or earth science education. You will get the occasional requirement to read a graph or read a table but actual numeracy skills and certainly working with formulae are generally pretty heavily suppressed at least in the text books that I see and so they see science as very divorced from math and vice versa,” said Odenwald.

Read the full interview on West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

 

 

Id: 
1131
Start Date: 
Thursday, June 9, 2011