Most of us are trained to go places and to value those places we’ve been. We tend to devalue our traveling time, a necessary irritation, and focus on the pleasures we experience after we arrive. On the other hand, we believe that quality science education is all about traveling and hardly at all about arriving. Just as in amateur sport, you try as hard as you can to win, yet winning, after all, is not of much consequence. But the struggling to win, whether during the game, or in practice, is what leads to skill and strategy development, and is what’s really exciting and important.

Traditional text books are all about the places of arrival. We do not use a text book here in the traditional sense. The handouts and handbook replace the text book, but they do not have the answers to the problems. They attempt to teach students how to discover. They teach background rules and skills. But the models and principles are discovered by the student.

We believe that a proper science course, one that conveys the spirit of science, one that instructs in the methods and skills of science, cannot be adequately taught with a traditional text book.

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