I mentioned earlier that Bill Nye the Science Guy is now streaming on Netflix!!! My 8 year old found out and was super excited because she had seen an episode at school. We sat down to watch our first episode together, titled Gravity. It's definitely a cool show that does a great job reaching out to kids. However, I was a bit disappointed based on two pieces of very misleading science that were presented.
1. When Bill was discussing gravity on other planets he kept referring to someone's weight in units of kilograms. Although I understand what he was saying, it is misleading. Your weight is the gravitational force acting on you and changes based on a planet's gravity. Your mass, measured in kilograms, doesn't change. Yet he was talking about different weight changes and reporting those changes in units of kilograms. Technically he's not wrong, but it was easily leading to confusion.
2. There's a song later in the episode and in that song a kid says that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 discovering Earth is round. Um...no. Absolutely wrong. Earth was known to be round for 1000 plus years by the time Columbus set forth on his voyage. Columbus did NOT discover the Earth was round and it was disappointing to see that in an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Given that, however, I still support this show and think it does much more good than harm to any child watching it. My daughter loved it and we'll continue watching it. Hopefully Netflix puts the other seasons on streaming soon.
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