Science Glossary

The negative reviews below are probably about old versions. This (possibly updated) version is pretty good. It's easy to use. It's good for looking something in particular up or just flipping through random terms and facts while sitting in a waiting room or in line. It might be nice if there were a back button so you could easily return to one you just looked at, and a quiz feature would be awesome!

I'm a middle school student and I was surprised they didn't have words like chromatography or distillation, methods that I find hard to remember.. But other than maybe adding some more words and little diagrams to their definition, it's a nice little thing that you could perhaps look at to remind yourself what they mean, but not that there isn't in much detail.

I've found this app to be very useful and informative, but I am suspicious of it's accuracy. For example, the definition of precision is simply wrong. They define precision as; "precision describes the degree to which individual measurements vary around a central value. Measurements with high precision are highly reproducible because repeated measurement will reliably give a similar result; " I teach statistics and research methodology at a major California university and the above is actually for the concept of measurement reliability. "Precision" is actually defined as the degree to which one measurement differentiates one quantity from another. It's most easily thought of as how many decimal points a measurement can be made to. In other words, three decimals is more precise than one or two decimals. A measurement made to three places can differentiate two different quantities that a measurement made to two decimals cannot. The moral of the story is that this is a useful reference source, but as with any other source, collaborating evidence should always be gotten to verify the source and/or the claims made by a reference. After all, that is how science works.