Welcome to the 2019-20 school year, students! We spent most of the first week getting to know each other and learning some of the basics of classroom procedure.
Most of the next 175 days of instruction will be devoted to reviewing the fundamentals of Chemistry.
A major focus of interest for chemists is pursuing all the different ways that matter and energy can be arranged. Much of that knowledge can not be predicted in advance by any theory, but instead can only be determined by experimental investigation. For this reason, Chemistry is an 'in-between science' focused tightly on the design, performance and analysis of experiments. This emphasis on the experiment requires chemists to use math constantly: in a sense, Chemistry is a math course with scientific application.
To help students understand the importance of math to science, and how mastering mathematics opens doors for tackling all kinds of problems, students will be asked to consider the true story of the West End Computer Section in U.S. space program, as shown in the film 'Hidden Figures.' They will see how an unappreciated group of human 'computers' used their abilities to approach scientific and social problems, and how they did their part to achieve great things.
Here is a brief trailer for the film. It shows an outline of the film's story:
Also, here is a short feature about the making of the film. In this feature, you will learn how author Margo Lee Shetterly, who wrote the book on which the film was based, grew up learning about the 'human computers' at West End, and how she became convinced that she needed to tell the story of women like Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn:
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