We mail the WikiPremed Science DVD free to school teachers

The first edition of the WikiPremed DVD for General Science will be available on April 21, 2008. Everyone who requested or received the earlier Physics Teacher Disc, your subscription continues and you will receive the new disc. This disc contains 6000 scientific figures, thousands of problems, and a unified science curriculum at the undergraduate level. Teachers of undergraduate level premedical students, Advanced Placement enrichment and general high school science students will find a great deal of assistance here. The image archive in the form of 600 x 800 JPEGs was created for classroom teaching. The WikiPremed DVD is available to any person who orders a printed publication here. The disc may be freely copied by students and teachers for each other.

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

In addition to more straightforward Verbal Reasoning and Essay work, students are encouraged to choose two or three areas of humanities focus to pursue for enrichment and enjoyment during the WikiPremed course. The deepening educational groove of medicine is going to make humanities work at a high level difficult in your future. Take the opportunity to enjoy as much of this type of enriching activity as possible before it is too late!

Shakespeare

Beowulf, Seafarer, Dream of the Rood

Doctor Poets, Novelists, and Playwrights

Nomad Empires of Inner Asia

Translating Poetry into English

Magic Realism

Prose Rhythm and Tone in Joyce and Hemingway

Lévi-Strauss, René Girard, & Giambattista Vico

Ovid and Virgil

World Architectural History

19th Century English Novel

Engineering

Electronics & Robotics

Energy Design for Architects

Mathematics

Algebra

Trigonometry

Calculus

The Basis of 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. The world is more intelligible if your scientific concepts are properly integrated.

A live course is beginning in Atlanta in May, and a video course will follow on the internet by about two months. This twenty module learning program will be freely available. As the year progresses, we will return to the most important concepts time and time again in the course, showing ideas early and returning to them often. Smaller epicycles of overview discussion and interdisciplinary discussion will occur, as we make our way down the long path of the course. This course is a spiraling curriculum for general undergraduate science review with a great deal of supporting material. Our highest ambition is that professors and students will enjoy this course enough to consider collaborating with us to make it better. Approximately sixty hours of video are in production over the next year using slideshows and live teaching from our Atlanta course at Horizons School Theater, which begins May 26, 2008.