| Sciences Unified course in the physical and biological sciences The WikiPremed DVD is free in the mail to any teacher who requests it. Please visit the request form if you are a teacher. Writing MCAT Essays Critically Verbal Reasoning Humanities Beowulf, Seafarer, Dream of the Rood Canterbury Tales Shakespeare Doctor Writers 19th Century English Novel Nomad Empires of Inner Asia Translating Poetry into English Cervantes Prose Stylistics in Joyce and Hemingway Lévi-Strauss, Girard, Vico Ovid and Virgil World Architectural History Engineering Electronics & Robotics Energy Design for Architects Mathematics Algebra Trigonometry Calculus The Science Course We are releasing a large body of work to the world under a creative commons general public attribution license. As long as a few simple attribution rules are followed, all resources may be freely downloaded, transmitted, copied, or developed into derivative works for both commercial or non-commercial purposes. In addition to being available here, as much as possible, the full resources of WikiPremed coursework are available on a separate disc which may be freely copied. Students preparing for the MCAT, All India PMT, and similar exams, will find this course and materials extremely relevant to achieving their educational goals. All curricula and course materials are freely available without tuition or fees of any kind. In addition to undergraduate level education, projects are under way here to provide resources for middle school and high school level teaching. In the fifteen years devoted to this project we have made real progress towards integrating physical and biological science instruction within a unified curriculum. We hope the curriculum developed here will be taken as a point of further collaborative progress in interdisciplinary science education. We have struggled hard with the problem of how to integrate the undergraduate science curriculum in an interdisciplinary manner. Through reviewing college physics, chemistry, organic, and biology over many contemporaneous teaching cycles with small groups of students,
we learned how to use interdisciplinary methods to reveal the connections between the sciences. These interdisciplinary teaching methods began at first as a way to help premedical students preparing for the MCAT gain an overall familiarity as early as possible in an MCAT review course in order to help them structure their knowledge base. Students need to be able to see the city of scientific knowledge, the subtopics of Physics, Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, and Biology, from the bird's eye view as well as street level. The initial goal for interdisciplinary discussion was to achieve comprehensive familiarity early in the course so that students could begin serious practice tests as soon as possible. After several years the benefit of focusing on the classical electrostatic force early in the learning program became apparent, instead of waiting until after thermodynamics, as in the traditional physics sequence. The electrostatic description of force and energy between point charges is the bridge from the fundamentals of physics to the foundation of general chemistry. Teaching atomic theory, chemical bonding, intermolecular force and states of matter in chemistry with the benefit of also teaching the electrostatic force in physics within the same framework provides a way to show how the fundamental mechanical laws of dynamics and energy are at play at the basis of general chemistry. Atomic Theory teaches us how to be careful in distinguishing modern and classical concepts, so the students learn how to use classical and quantum concepts to build the thermodynamic picture of chemical energy change. To help students apply what they have learned from physics about interpreting chemical energy systems, the next phase of the course is thermodynamics, a unified presentation combining physics and chemistry for heat & temperature, ideal gas, kinetic theory, the laws of thermodynamics, thermochemistry, chemical thermodynamics, spontaneity, equilibrium and chemical kinetics, teaching the same fundamentals, but with physics and chemistry both guiding the frame of reference to a much clearer picture of microstate ensembles. Our experience in teaching is that an integrated approach makes discussion of thermodynamics much more intuitive for undergraduate students. In the Biology lecture course, students often struggle to understand the meaning of the high energy electrons in metabolism. Having a unified teaching vocabulary for physics and chemistry really helps students here at one of the main conceptual exchanges in science, the wheel of the course, organic chemistry, the macromolecules, cell membranes, cellular processes, bioenergetics and metabolism. If a student can learn to imagine a mitochondrion as long as a football field, the length of one hundred thousand chemical bonds, the chemical bonds would be about a millimeter in length. Those atoms are physical, electrodynamic entities within a thermodynamic system. They attract and repel each other and tumble through different states. |
