Word: projections
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is classic instruction for Project STAR (Science Teaching Through Its Astronomical Roots), a program taught in 18 schools in 13 states. STAR is based on the premise that books are abysmal tools for learning science. "It's impossible to understand an astronomy diagram without using three dimensions at proper scale," says Irwin Shapiro, the irrepressible director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and the man who dreamed up STAR six years ago. "High school science textbooks are impossible. They are dense with concepts and jargon. No one understands what's going on." Adds Kenneth Mirvis...
...Through Project STAR, which received $833,000 in seed money from the National Science Foundation in 1985, Shapiro hopes to correct such misunderstandings. The goal of the program is not merely to teach astronomy to high school students but also to use astronomical examples to instill basic concepts of math and science. Thus students may master the inverse-square law of physics by seeing that when a star doubles its distance from a certain point, it becomes one-quarter as bright. Why choose astronomy for this purpose? "It's not as abstract as chemistry and physics," says Shapiro...
...million students, spend about a month at the astrophysics center learning the fundamentals of the STAR approach. They are taught that the road to enlightenment lies in the third dimension. "To convert from three dimensions to two and back to three again leads to special reasoning ability," says project director Philip Sadler...
...that very moment, several dozen volunteers are playing out the same scene in several hundred rooms and apartments all across San Francisco, feeding and cheering men and women with AIDS. These volunteers are the soldiers of Project Open Hand, which Brinker, 66, started in 1985. She and her workers now provide 1,100 meals...
...founded Project Open Hand with seven "clients." Each day by 5 a.m., she would prowl the produce markets for "distressed" vegetables. She cooked in a church basement and delivered the meals in her battered Volkswagen van. "Some of the people were so emaciated," she remembers, "they would have to crawl to where the buzzer...