I think capturing interest with bombastic science is a great way to funnel people into the boring science. Showing the cool things that can be done with science, an example being AlphaGo, is a cool way to get people interested in fields like machine learning. Otherwise people don't even know the field exists, what the applications are, and never think to pursue it to begin with.
There are modern methods to teaching that embrace top-down approaches. I think a lot of kids struggle with topics like math because they're never given the applicability or told why it matters. They're just force to memorize formulas they don't care about. If you could preface these classes with "look at all this cool stuff we've achieved using math" then I think you'd find some of those kids a lot more engaged.
There are modern methods to teaching that embrace top-down approaches. I think a lot of kids struggle with topics like math because they're never given the applicability or told why it matters. They're just force to memorize formulas they don't care about. If you could preface these classes with "look at all this cool stuff we've achieved using math" then I think you'd find some of those kids a lot more engaged.