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Non-science students enrolled in astrophotography classes created by scientists at the University of California, Riverside reported a better understanding of how to use a telescope and camera and how to process images, according to a recently published paper about the class.
In addition, after taking the classes, the students, most of whom were UC Riverside non-STEM (Science, Technology. Engineering, Mathematics) majors, were eager to take up astrophotography as a hobby, opening the path to become future citizen scientists and amateur astronomers, groups which historically have analyzed a lot of astronomical data and made numerous discoveries.
The idea of the classes was to engage students majoring in fields such as social sciences, humanities, business and arts in science. Astronomy is considered by many a gateway into science. More than 200,000 non-science majors enroll in an introductory astronomy class every year in the United States, but this will likely be their only interaction with a natural science during their undergraduate studies.
Astrophotography is a great way to teach science in a visual and hands-on manner, De Leo Winkler said. It also provides a way to break through the mathematical anxiety that many non-science majors experience.
https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/43195
[Paper]: Astrophotography, a portal for engaging non-STEM majors in science
[Also Covered By]: Phys.org
I believe that Amateur Radio, Amateur Radio Astronomy, Amateur Rocketry (and similar activities) also has the potential to attract people, from all walks of life, to STEM subjects. Do you people think that this could be the best way to attract people to STEM disciplines ?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 27 2016, @01:46PM
Which turned into a loss for the university and they had to drop the course after a semester. Guess it was the drawback of a free education system, universities gets paid by the government for actually passing students and not just enrolling them.
Can't they just offer it non-credit? I took some Japanese classes that way at my local state-U. My wife took some photographic art classes the same way.
There are huge cognitive dissonance problems with non-credit non-degree courses in that non-credit course fees are like $10/credit, which is probably close to the real cost of providing the room and instructor, although if you take the same course with the same instructor and same assignments for credit its right up to "what the market will bear" at $200+/credit or whatever it is.
If the state U system existed to educate the taxpaying populace a BS degree would cost about one or two grand total. If its all a financial scam (which it is) then you get the whole $100K of student loans BS for the same classes. In the old days the State U system existed to provide college sports as a service, I donno if things have gone uphill or downhill in a philosophical sense from there.
Another novelty is the local state-U extension offers individual non credit classes, a certificate, AS degree, and BS degrees in womens studies, but its basically all the same classes with differing amounts of "well rounded-ness" bolted on to the identical core classes. So if you want to study women (and what male does not) then you can pay wildly varying amounts of money and obtain wildly varying official titles of nobility at the end if you jump thru the hoops and bark the correct things in response, but you're gonna take the same classes regardless of result.
Its amusing that when I moved here about six blocks from campus I was all ready to take fun classes for entertainment but instead the kids start squirting out of my wife and the internet happens and now I have very little motivation to walk to campus after work to listen to a philosophy lecture when there's stanford's plato online and perfectly good lectures on archive.org or pirated or coursera or whatever, so I've taken a grand total of 1 non-credit class.
Also my Japanese classes were almost entirely made up of teen and near teen anime fans, I was the only person there who was like "eh" and didn't have a waifu pillow or collect box sets like some collect legos. Taking a wild guess the fine arts lab classes probably contain a lot of stereotypical art school chix and the STEM classes are probably like the ones I took decades ago that were total sausage-fests. I think our graduating class had one girl make it to the start of op amp class (it had a long silly name that only a committee could of created of course, the class I mean, not the girl). From memory power supply rectification topologies was her downfall, and many of the guys also seemed incapable of wiring a simple full wave rectifier in lab without starting a fire... scary to think decades later those same guys are designing lithium battery protection circuits and nuclear plant equipment and stuff like that.