Welcome to Week 14!
>>Click Here for this week’s Funletter<<
Sorry about the delay in Newsletters – I was focused on wrapping up this summer’s Young Scholars Program. Check our their final projects here.
This week is another funletter – all about fun and games! Written by our work study Sakura, this newsletter focuses on word puzzles related to Pharmacy (answer key at bottom of newsletter).
Resource Highlight
Pharmacy is “charged with the discovery, production, control, disposal, safe and effective use of drugs”. When you hear the word “drug” in the media, it usually refers to illegal drugs – but pharmacists instead primarily focus on pharmaceutical/medical drugs, such as acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin). As a pharmacist, you’ll need to know the names and functions of all sorts of drugs and drug classes (analgesics, antihistamines, bronchodilators, quinolones, etc). You probably don’t need to know all of them – as there are a LOT of them, but certainly the most common ones. There are many quick references online, such as Drugs.com, which is a well-maintained, searchable database of drugs, including their names, uses, side effects, etc.
Learning to become a pharmacist requires getting a degree in pharmacy. Northeastern has a school dedicated to Pharmacy – the School of Pharmacy, offering various pathways into pharmacy, including the 6 year Bachelors->PhD program, which Sakura (who wrote the funletter above) is a part of. One way to get into learning pharmacy is actually playing games. There’s been research done into using educational games to foster learning and complement teaching materials (serious games, educational games) – results are mixed: well-designed learning games can work/teach (such as Pharmacy Simulator), but other games are just for fun (such as “Quiz: Pokemon or Drug” – Round 1, Round 2, Round 3).
Web Resources for K-12 Students and Parents
In addition to the resources highlighted above, which are tied directly to the Newsletter topic, we will also highlight two new web resources each week.
- Science Matters
ScienceMatters is a science publishing platform that, instead of publishing stories, publishes single, validated observations, thus highlighting the fundamental unit of scientific progress – the observation. - Zooniverse
Zooniverse is an online people-powered research platform, where you can go and be a researcher on a variety of projects.
