journal of science education

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Editorial

C S Yogananda, Associate Editor

It is a pleasure to wish our readers a very happy 2002! (It is a palindromic year; when is the next such?) It has been more than a hundred years since Radio connected the world and brought people together. We salute it’s inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874 -1937) in this issue. Articles by Harsh Vardhan and S Rangarajan give you a glimpse of the development of radio broadcasting from the experiments of Heinrich Hertz which paved the way to the present day satellite radio. Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1909 for his invention and excerpts from his Nobel address give a first hand account of the road he took.

Even the vast skies are not free from devastating collisions/accidents. Many of you may remember comet Shoemaker-Levy’s encounter with Jupiter in 1994. Utpal Mukhopadhyay gives a lucid account of the phenomenon of comet splitting/collisions with other heavenly objects.

Many readers were impressed by the remarkable satellite images of our Earth featured in the poster along with the December 2001 issue. Navalgund’s article talks about the technology involved in producing such images.

Computer science started off as a tool to help physicists and mathematicians in their work and later emerged as an independent discipline in its own right. It now finds its place even in the school curriculum. I found the following interesting remark by Tom Verhoeff quoted in an article by Meena Mahajan (see: http://www.imsc.ernet.in/~iarcs/vol3-1/ioi.html ):

“...One measure of acceptance and integration of a discipline into the curriculum is the situation regarding competitions in that discipline. A healthy, diverse set of competition events indicates that the discipline is well accepted. A lack of (good) competition is a sign of poor acceptance...”.

The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) held annually since 1989 for school children has been a great success thus proving the acceptance of computer science as part of school curriculum. India has not sent a team so far but with an Indian observer taking part in IOI-2001 held in Finland, India is eligible to send a team to IOI from now on. We bring you a report on IOI-2001 by Madhavan Mukund who participated as an observer. We are sure India will field a good team in the coming years.

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