Space Math Academy(space-math.academy) |
Space Math Academy(space-math.academy) |
- "UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE" I guess this is a joke but I don't really get it, just seems like a weird thing to have there.
- In the first popup, the "audio transmission" is significantly different than the printed text.
- "The Earth is a sphere." - this is not true, I think it should be classified as a hypothesis
- "The universe is expanding." Isn't this a theory? I don't think it can be called "a basic statement", it is a well-tested theory based on a lot of observational evidence.
- "Humans and gorillas evolved from a common ancestor species." This is obviously a theory, it's like THE theory when you need an example of what a theory is. You cannot establish this by experiment or observation.
- "Light is an electromagnetic phenomenon described by Maxwell's Laws" Why is this classified as a theory?
etc.
The categorization of this first lesson seems very arbitrary, and often contradictory with the "knowledge database" on the left.
Edit: Did you AI-generate these questions and then not proofread them?
I do agree much of the categorisation is baffling (I could nitpick several others). In that respect it's a shame to start off with that lesson when some of the others are so much more relevant to the mission concept, interesting and less debatable
Sure, with instruments you can measure it and find that it deviates from a perfect sphere. But every object that is made of atoms multiple atoms is not a perfect sphere.
I just think it shouldn't be used as a canonical example of a fact when you'll probably learn at some point that it technically isn't true.
Is not a fact: I have never died jumping out of a window, thus it is a hypothesis (because it is testable, though that raise epistemological problems in of itself)
But the first exercise is about judging statements based on nebulous definitions, definitely unrelated to mathematics?
I do question the effectiveness (and accuracy) of this exercise, but its learning objectives I think are quite apt.
> and correctly taxonomising those propositions
The correct taxonomy for a proposition is true/false and proven/unproven.
I can not even fathom a mathematical model where distinguishing a "law" from a "fact" is meaningful.
And the idea of defining a "fact" as something empirically demonstrated is just ridiculous, I totally reject it.
Reimagined NASA’s Space Math curriculum (https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/) as an immersive game, instead of static PDFs. Students solve the same problems real scientists face daily -- calculating orbits and trajectories, dealing with space weather, etc. -- in an interactive way that goes beyond worksheets (or just sending PDFs to an LLM).
https://space-math.academy https://www.github.com/dynamicwebpaige/space-math
Powered by Gemini for storytelling and text-to-speech (TTS). Links to the GitHub repo and live link that you can play above, thanks to Google Cloud Run. Please file feature requests, if there's enough interest will add more missions and a leaderboard.
specifically I got hit with "chimpanzees and humans have common ancestor" (or something like that)
definition for a "fact" (supposed correct answer) given on the page ("A basic statement established by experiment or observation. True under specific conditions.") seems to me akin to "direct result of some experiment"
meanwhile, determining common ancestry - in my mind - took a lot of work, comparing anatomy, digging out bones and stuff... all the correlation, all the composition
surely it's more of a theory that's supported by many facts?
I also seen few other wrong classifications.
Sorry, good idea, but such mistakes made it unplayable.
"The Earth is a sphere" -> nope
"Water freezes at 32F" -> depends
"Apes and Humans share a common ancestor" -> not a fact, although an extremely likely theory. The site's definition about fact mentions observability. I'd accept "Ape and Humans share 99.x% of DNA, indicating common ancestry" as a fact
It's not some arcane nerd knowledge. It's just a detail people don't remember from school because it's irrelevant to their lives.
Actually very nicely designed, but the pedant in me is screaming "you can't just expect the other 3 solar panels to have the same number of dead zones" and I can't find the source either...
Put another way, decidability is a large area of mathematical research.
What does ZF(C) have to do with decidability? Decidability is a question in any sufficiently complex system (Gödel's first theorem). And exactly this distinction is what I made for the taxonomy of propositions, you can group them into true and false and also into provable and unprovable. What would be a fact and what would be a law?
Regardless of that, in neither case the empiricism the site uses to define a fact would play any role.