Introduction
Janet Sumner is your guide through this course. She is a Media Fellow at The Open University with a specialist interest in volcanoes. Janet will appear at the start of each week to tip you off about the highlights and challenges, to remind you what you’ve learned and to help you make the most of these four weeks of scientific discovery.
Over the next four weeks you will look at how scientists:
- communicate with each other
- calculate area, volume and density and what this means for the Greenland ice sheet
- present numbers using significant figures, decimal places, fractions and percentages
- use different types of averages, draw and interpret graphs and find correlations in data.
This course is going to assume that you are new to studying science, so don’t worry if you haven’t studied science before.
The course starts off simply, but by Week 4 you will be calculating the density of the Greenland ice sheet! This week, you’ll be focusing on how numbers are used in science.
To test your knowledge you can try the end-of-week quizzes and there’s a final end-of-course quiz.
There are plenty of opportunities to communicate with other learners. There are forum threads for activities in each week. Please join in!
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OpenLearn - Basic science: understanding numbers
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