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education science

Teaching scientific thinking

Dr Steven Sexton is a primary school teacher who now works for the University of Otago. He tells us about “Nature of Science” as the basis of the New Zealand Science Curriculum. Rather than content (learning the periodic table and so on), the focus is engaging in scientific thinking and process, whatever the context.

Shane’s number of the week: 40. In forty years we will all have to be vegetarians. Malik Falkenmark and colleagues at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) argue that water will be the scarce resource of the medium term future. Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050.