Abstract
When Artificial Life approaches are used with school pupils, it is generally to help them learn about the dynamics of living systems and/or their evolution. Here, we propose to use it to teach the scientific and experimental method, rather than biology. We experimented this alternative pedagogical usage during the 5 days internship of a young schoolboy – Quentin – with astonishing results. Indeed, not only Quentin easily grasped the principles of science and experiments but meanwhile he also collected very interesting results that shed a new light on the evolution of genome size and, more precisely, on genome streamlining. This article summarizes this success story and analyzes its results on both educational and scientific perspectives.
Issue Section:
Philosophy, Language, Art and Education
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© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2019
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Issue Section:
Philosophy, Language, Art and Education