ABSTRACT
When you listen to people talking about science, or read about it in a book, you may be struck that it is about two different kinds of thing. There are things that are recognizable from the everyday world – water, rust, microscopes, springs, and so on. But there are other unfamiliar things which seem to belong to a different world – a ‘scientific world’ – such as atoms, entropy, genes, potential energy and ecological niches. This notion of a ‘different world’ can be helpful in understanding what science is like. In order to understand the real world, we make models of it – or ‘imagined worlds’ – to try to represent what the real world is like. There is a lot that we do not know about how the real world behaves. But in the imagined worlds that we have created, we can talk with certainty-we know because we created them. Many pupils are attracted to science because of this apparent certainty. Many pupils are put off it for precisely the same reason. What is often lost in the way that science is presented is that scientific models are the results of creative acts of the imagination. This chapter will explore the use of models, including the role of computer models, in science and in learning science.
