Pedagogy of scale

[Isaac Dupree]

According to a science educator I was chatting with,

If you show a thing where you zoom in or out continuously (e.g. from the
size of a book to the size of an atom), it's hard for people to get an
intuitive sense of scale.

However you can set certain zoom levels - say, one where 1 meter is a
standard size and it's reasonable to talk about things from 1km to 1mm
in size, and another zoom level where 1 micrometer is a standard size
and it's reasonable to talk about things from 1mm to 1nm, etc. Then,
apparently, people have mental reference points and it helps.

I can see how this would work in my mind, anyway.

(I'm not sure that Lasercake will have "things" at enough scales for
this to be helpful? At any rate I suppose we have plans for human scale
and up, but not down very much because it would take longer to compute.)

-Isaac