4 ms·

Just looked up the channels you mentioned as well as the hydraulic press one from the article and they don't look like viable sources of education to me. The Hy

Just looked up the channels you mentioned as well as the hydraulic press one from the article and they don't look like viable sources of education to me. The Hydraulic Press and Red Hot Nickel Ball channels are purely entertainment along the same lines of "Will It Blend?" The other two are more in depth, but are still low (Thunderfoot seems to be a feminism/politics/atheism channel?) in educational value. They might serve to get people interested in science, but they're unsuitable for learning. Is this the same as video games getting children interested in programming? Is that how it works, or do kids turn to programming because they want to make video games? If the latter then there's not much value at all in these channels. No one learns computer science from watching Call of Duty videos.

vlasev 10y ago
> (Thunderfoot seems to be a feminism/politics/atheism channel?) That's why the GP is saying Thunderfoot's science stuff.
ajuc 10y ago
I meant the science stuff, not the feminism/atheism/mythbusting rants. Thunderfoot made some videos on youtube sponsored by patreon. He was experimenting with alkalic metals, and discovered that the reaction can't be driven by the hydrogen reacting as it was usually explained. He went on to work on that in lab with coleagues, wrote a paper and got published in Nature. It seems like science to me, and it was crowdfunded, that's what got me excited, because it could be used to fund research that's hard to get funded by traditional means ("is cool" is a different motivation than "is useful", so there may be many low hanging fruits). The more angles the better. As for education - it won't replace theorethical lessons, but I think it's useful to see real experiments to develop intuition about how the theories play out in real life, how the quantities look like, what's realistic and what's not. Even with the RHNB which I agree is mostly entertainment - school physic lessons often don't allow me to predict the result of a given video. Yes it's most probably useless for my life, but so are most of the lessons I had in school. I like having the intuition about how everyday stuff behaves in extreme conditions. It's the difference between knowing that water can freeze, and seeing winter for yourself. It's that part that was the most jarring hole in physic and chemistry lessons I had (we almost never got our hands dirty, and even if we did - it was done so fast that usually nobody got the experiments right, and there was no time to work out why for everybody, so teachers just moved on). And the stuff used in school experiments were "magical" ingredients that you wouldn't know where to get, and how to handle. I envy the kids today that they can just look up "how to make sugar+saltpeter rocket". When I was a kid I tried it many times and it never flied (no textbook mentioned you have to have fresh dry saltpeter, or that you can dry old saltpeter in electric owen - it was just a formula and warning that could as well mean "burning 1 gram will destroy your home" or "burning 1 kg will be slightly inconvenient").

vlasev 10y ago

> (Thunderfoot seems to be a feminism/politics/atheism channel?) That's why the GP is saying Thunderfoot's science stuff.

ajuc 10y ago

I meant the science stuff, not the feminism/atheism/mythbusting rants. Thunderfoot made some videos on youtube sponsored by patreon. He was experimenting with alkalic metals, and discovered that the reaction can't be driven by the hydrogen reacting as it was usually explained. He went on to work on that in lab with coleagues, wrote a paper and got published in Nature. It seems like science to me, and it was crowdfunded, that's what got me excited, because it could be used to fund research that's hard to get funded by traditional means ("is cool" is a different motivation than "is useful", so there may be many low hanging fruits). The more angles the better. As for education - it won't replace theorethical lessons, but I think it's useful to see real experiments to develop intuition about how the theories play out in real life, how the quantities look like, what's realistic and what's not. Even with the RHNB which I agree is mostly entertainment - school physic lessons often don't allow me to predict the result of a given video. Yes it's most probably useless for my life, but so are most of the lessons I had in school. I like having the intuition about how everyday stuff behaves in extreme conditions. It's the difference between knowing that water can freeze, and seeing winter for yourself. It's that part that was the most jarring hole in physic and chemistry lessons I had (we almost never got our hands dirty, and even if we did - it was done so fast that usually nobody got the experiments right, and there was no time to work out why for everybody, so teachers just moved on). And the stuff used in school experiments were "magical" ingredients that you wouldn't know where to get, and how to handle. I envy the kids today that they can just look up "how to make sugar+saltpeter rocket". When I was a kid I tried it many times and it never flied (no textbook mentioned you have to have fresh dry saltpeter, or that you can dry old saltpeter in electric owen - it was just a formula and warning that could as well mean "burning 1 gram will destroy your home" or "burning 1 kg will be slightly inconvenient").