Educational Experiment for Hyphotetical Simulation on Line in a Pandemic Context with Natural Sciences Students

Abstract

During the years 2020 and 2021, in practically all the universities in the world, face-to-face school activities were suspended, causing a great negative impact in those disciplines where practical practices of an experimental nature or carrying out field work are essential. With the intention of bringing first-time students to the biology degree at UNAM-Iztacala, an experimental exercise was designed, applied and evaluated, with true data that came from an exploration of numerical skills shown by the same students, practice that was done online. Being an experiment, linked to mathematics education and given the pandemic situation that is still in force, an attempt was made to extend with due epistemological prudence, the behavior of the results of the numerical ability observed in these students, with some indicators on the way in which the immunization of human communities with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic is presumably being achieved. Recognizing the notorious difference between the domains of a presumed “numerical sufficiency” on the part of the examined students and that which concerns a presumable “immunization” in a hypothetical population, the exercise did allow to make some analogies, between the predictions of results that can be expected and what is observed in an experimental trial.