The Director of the Doctoral Program in Education at UMCE and co-founder of the PachemLab research group, Dr Jorge Rodríguez-Becerra, was invited as an expert and due to his outstanding career as a researcher, to participate as editor in the journal Frontiers in Education, publisher of prestigious, recognized scientific publications in different disciplinary fields and leader in the publication of open access articles.
According to Director Rodríguez, the Frontiers team asked him to present a topic to create a collection of articles that would address educational content. Before the call, the academic suggested the research topic "Computational Science and STEM Education", which was approved and already has the confirmation of thirteen researchers from Chile, Belgium and the United Kingdom, interested in submitting, sending their articles for editing and peer review.
Professor Jorge Rodríguez-Becerra's proposal in which he participates together with Dr Johannes Pernaa, an academic at the University of Helsinki, Finland, focuses on learning, teaching and the opportunities that Computational Science can provide for STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), in skills such as problem finding and solving, evidence-based reasoning, and the development of computational thinking.
In a growing revolution driven by technology, explained Dr Rodríguez, "Computational Science is now indispensable for solving or the solution of complex problems in different sectors of knowledge. In this sense, science education and teacher training must be prepared with new solutions that reveal, and highlight practices of modern science and interdisciplinary models to support science learning by meeting the needs of a society that experiences increasingly accelerated technological changes”.
This research topic seeks to highlight educational innovations to promote hands-on Computational Science and student-centred learning environments in school or undergraduate education, in which pedagogical aspects of implementations that use these tools are described, as well as the model's description, the computational details used in the educational context and its impacts on student learning.
The topics to review in this special edition include Education in Computational Chemistry and Chemoinformatics, Education in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, STEM Education from an interdisciplinary and integrative approach, and Teachers' perspectives on the possibilities and challenges of using Scientific Computing tools. in STEM education, among others.
More information at Frontiers in Education
* Translation: Prof. Silvana Salvarani Pometto.
