Proceedings of the Singapore National Academy of Science, 2021
As a reaction to the growing economical, ecological and societal demands on education innumerous ... more As a reaction to the growing economical, ecological and societal demands on education innumerous efforts and programs have been initiated throughout the educational chain to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the STEM field. On that background we sketch a framework to foster creative engagement in learning to promote scientific inquiry and modeling processes. In the theoretical part the article presents a dualistic perspective on the grounding of creative cognition in concrete experience, highlighting the productive and reflexive interplay of procedural and conceptual knowing. Their entanglement is pivotal to successful knowledge construction and application in science and technology. The ‘mechanics’ of creativity is elaborated exemplarily in a project based learning sequence that starts from investigating and modeling elastic forces as a basic paradigm of creative model construction. The creative part refers to conceptual expansions of the elastic spring model that ass...
Experiments play many different roles in research and education. While in the traditional view ex... more Experiments play many different roles in research and education. While in the traditional view experiments are considered mere test instances of models and theories they can unfold a creative life of their own beyond that formal role and foster fluid knowledge. Based upon arguments from epistemology of science as well as educational and cognitive theories, the present contribution highlights their generative functions in stimulating productive thinking, knowledge transfer and theoretical reflections. The article substantiates the view of experiments as engines of intuition and knowing by providing introductory examples from nanoscience education based on hands-on models of scanning probe methods. In combination with analogical reasoning the models convey an experience based access to a highly productive interdisciplinary field of research and innovative applications. Apart from visualizing the invisible and making transformations of forms and functions tangible, the toy systems embo...
Proceedings of the Singapore National Academy of Science, 2021
As a reaction to the growing economical, ecological and societal demands on education innumerous ... more As a reaction to the growing economical, ecological and societal demands on education innumerous efforts and programs have been initiated throughout the educational chain to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the STEM field. On that background we sketch a framework to foster creative engagement in learning to promote scientific inquiry and modeling processes. In the theoretical part the article presents a dualistic perspective on the grounding of creative cognition in concrete experience, highlighting the productive and reflexive interplay of procedural and conceptual knowing. Their entanglement is pivotal to successful knowledge construction and application in science and technology. The ‘mechanics’ of creativity is elaborated exemplarily in a project based learning sequence that starts from investigating and modeling elastic forces as a basic paradigm of creative model construction. The creative part refers to conceptual expansions of the elastic spring model that ass...
Experiments play many different roles in research and education. While in the traditional view ex... more Experiments play many different roles in research and education. While in the traditional view experiments are considered mere test instances of models and theories they can unfold a creative life of their own beyond that formal role and foster fluid knowledge. Based upon arguments from epistemology of science as well as educational and cognitive theories, the present contribution highlights their generative functions in stimulating productive thinking, knowledge transfer and theoretical reflections. The article substantiates the view of experiments as engines of intuition and knowing by providing introductory examples from nanoscience education based on hands-on models of scanning probe methods. In combination with analogical reasoning the models convey an experience based access to a highly productive interdisciplinary field of research and innovative applications. Apart from visualizing the invisible and making transformations of forms and functions tangible, the toy systems embo...
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Papers by Manfred Euler