“Why do I need to learn this?” This question is often heard by teachers from students since the beginning of schooling. From math to biology, they just do not see the importance of these disciplines on their real lives or future lives. “Education provides humanity with a means to share previous knowledge with future generation through discovery and interactions. Teachers provide the very thread that sustains and enhance our very existence.” (Fairbank, 2010) Teachers supply the link from content/theory to application. For example, I had twin brothers that took two of my science classes since I was hired. One was an artist and into gaming, and the other was into game development. I took this knowledge of interests and made whatever I was teaching relevant to them (they are now starting their first year at the Art Institute of Tucson.
For my master’s in biology I had to take a course in mathematical modeling, but it was taught by my ecology mentor and thesis professor. It was made interesting because we studied how we could use mathematical modeling in studying population and evolutionary biology. We learned the history of Game Theory, the mathematicians and, later, biologists who further applied it to their studies.
We studied John Maynard Smith and his books (see reference section below) were our textbooks. John Maynard Smith (1920-2004) was one of the most influential evolutionary biologists in recent history. He studied under J. B. S. Haldane, also a well-renowned biologist.
Smith, along with George R. Price (1922-1975), another population geneticist, introduced the concept of evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), which was the cornerstone in game theory. In ESS a player’s complete algorithm for playing a game (i.e. strategy, which are any of the options a player can choose in a setting where the outcome depends not only on his own actions but also on the actions of others), which tells a player what to do for all possible situations during the game.
This lead us to apply Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), to our research. EGT is the application of game theory to evolving populations of lifeforms in biology. It is useful for defining a framework of contests and analytical strategies into which Darwinian competition can be modeled.
So let’s get to know our students. Teach them what they need to know but make it relevant to them.
Interest in Game Theory piqued? Recent thoughts on games and evolutionary game theory can be found here:
References
Easley, David and Kleinberg, Jon. 2010. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press, chapters 6 and 7.
Fairbank, Mark. 2010. Answering the Essential Student Question: Why Do We Need to Learn This? Homeroom: The official blog of the U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from
http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/01/answering-the-essential-student-question-why-do-we-need-to-learn-this/
Maynard Smith, J., 1974 Models in Ecology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Maynard Smith, J., 1978 The Evolution of Sex. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Maynard Smith, J., 1982 Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Maynard Smith, J., 1989 Evolutionary Genetics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
No comments:
Post a Comment