No word yet about the popular lectures.
(Applied Math Professor and course instructor Michael P. ) Brenner said they were “extremely impressed” with how well the students did in their final projects and how much general excitement there is about the intersection of science and cooking at Harvard…
The class began as an “experiment,” said Brenner.
“We did not know for sure that the class would ‘work,’” he said, citing the difficulty of developing an effective curriculum to teach science to non-scientists.
“The whole undertaking could have gone wrong on a number of different levels,” Brenner said.
Physics Professor David A. Weitz, who co-founded and co-teaches the class with Brenner, said he was pleased with the success of the course.
“I spent all my life in academia trying to teach physics…often to nonscientists, and to be honest it’s a struggle and they don’t want to learn it,” Weitz said. “For the first time students were interested. They wanted to learn—they enjoyed it.”