Living Smart

III SCIENCE & STEM EDUCATION 092 093 forces students to lose their individuality and become test- taking robots. Not only does this go against the core of the STEM teaching philosophy, it creates a bigger problem for society as this exam process creates a population of homogenous graduates, each one more replaceable than the next in the corporate world. What we want from STEM education is that students should become critical thinkers who can use out-of-the-box methods to solve real-world problems. They need to be able to speak their minds, use their observational skills more and have greater opportunities to apply their knowledge to try and solve problems. To further promote creative thinking processes, schools can consider developing “divergent testing-styled examinations” whereby there are multiple answers to the questions and students get rewarded for creativity. To increase interest in STEM, students should also be made aware of how these subjects can be applied to real-life jobs – for example, science and math are often taught separately without demonstrating their applications in technology and engineering. Like all things in life, society requires a diverse range of people with different skillsets. Let’ s not be fooled into thinking that one set of education theory will suit all students. Published on April 10, 2019 Here’s a drink to acid test for pseudoscience Dr. Jason CHAN Lecturer I, Department of Chemistry S cience is hailed by modern society as an academic discipline of strict moral grounding and high integrity. Almost every one would place some degree of trust in scientific studies as they are deemed to represent knowledge derived from empirical evidence gathered through meticulous experiments. Given its high social status, there is no doubt that people would feel inclined to trust a product or service backed up by scientific studies or claims. Unlike medical products and services that are tightly regulated by civil authorities, commercial use of scientific claims is less severely vetted. This has created a grey area for pseudoscientists, who devise clever scams that have the appearance of science but are full of errors and lies. One can learn well from a few recent (and still ongoing) examples – the alkaline diet and alkaline water scam. Hype about the “alkaline diet” began with a book called The pH Miracle by Robert Young. Young claimed that ailments of the body, including cancers, resulted from an imbalance of pH. He proposed that an alkaline diet could provide cures. However, his acid-base theory was only referring to foods rich in acid-forming elements (such as carbon, nitrogen and sulfur) or alkali-forming elements (such as potassium, calcium and magnesium). In other words, he was promoting a plant-based diet over a calorie-laden greasy meaty diet.