快猫短视频

IT OBVIOUSLY helps students learn if their teacher has a magnetic
personality, but two physicists in Argentina have taken this idea to the
extreme. They have used the theory of how atoms behave in a magnet to model
children鈥檚 behaviour in a classroom.

Atoms in a material like iron create their own tiny magnetic fields, thanks
to the spin of their electrons. If the directions of these spins are organised
randomly in the material, it will have no overall magnetic field. But if all the
spins line up, the material becomes magnetised, as in a bar magnet. To work out
the magnetic properties of a material, physicists assess the effect each atom鈥檚
spin has on its nearest neighbours鈥� and take into account any overall magnetic
field or applied field.

Now Ezequiel Albano and Clelia Bordogna of the Institute of Theoretical and
Applied Physical Chemistry in La Plata, Argentina, have applied this theory to
schoolkids. With each pupil represented as an atom鈥檚 spin, they reckon a teacher
behaves like an external magnetic field, coaxing kids to line up and focus on
the lesson.

Kids in the model interact with each other too. If one is inclined to line
up, it will encourage its neighbours to do the same. If its spin is pointing all
over the place鈥攁nalogous to chatting and passing notes鈥攊t won鈥檛 be
helping its neighbours concentrate. Group work was simulated by making a few
neighbouring spins interact more strongly with each other than with those in
different groups. 鈥淚f you have all the bad students in one group they don鈥檛
learn,鈥� says Albano, but dispersing them among lots of groups means better
students will suffer.

Peter Garik of Boston University鈥檚 School of Education says that although the
new analysis 鈥渟eems like a farce, you do have to have cooperative effects for
students to learn, and magnetism is an example of that.鈥�