Systematic Errors: Stories about failed experiments

The Story Collider

Many factors can lead to a failed experiment -- human errors, errors in measurement, and sometimes just random errors. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share tales of when their experiments didn’t go as planned.

Part 1: As a new science teacher, Zeke Kossover is determined to capture the attention of his students.

Part 2: While on a field expedition in Kenya, Evan Wilson is tasked with the seemingly impossible job of figuring out the role of dust in wearing down herbivore teeth.

Marc “Zeke” Kossover has been presenting stories as part of his physics circus shows all over the country in venues from coffee shops and music halls to the National Science Foundation and Capitol Hill. He thinks of them as magic shows, but in reverse—the secret to a magic trick is to make something simple intentionally confusing, while Zeke tries to make confusing things easy to understand. Zeke was a physics and environmental science teacher before dying and going to teacher heaven and getting a job at the Exploratorium. His main work is helping science teachers have the resources they need to be the best teachers they can be, like designing novel hands-on activities for teachers to use in their classrooms and helping new teachers find their voices in their classrooms. He believes that science education starts when students construct their own understanding of the world.

Evan Wilson is an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist focused on the dawn of technology and emergence of human culture. They study the interplay between technology/culture and biology via the Stone Age archaeological record of Eastern Africa. They have done fieldwork spanning the last 3.5 million years in Kenya and Ethiopia discovering both fossils and artifacts to better understand the deep human past and our evolutionary history.

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