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It seems like the things that are more painful to learn and use make your brain work harder, and thus make you learn better. Or, maybe it is the case that peopl

by jimmies 10y ago

It seems like the things that are more painful to learn and use make your brain work harder, and thus make you learn better. Or, maybe it is the case that people who know to use the hard stuff are interested in the subject enough to learn how to do it the hard way. You wouldn't be surprised that those who use Assembly to program tend to have better programming skills compared to those who only can program in Visual Basic, would you? Veritasium also mentioned this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVV8pch1dM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVV8pch1dM The more interesting question to ask to me is (1) whether it is the abacus that makes children learn better, or it is just that children who choose to use the abacus learn better (2) whether teaching abacus use at the beginning has the same effect as teaching abacus use later on after the students already know how to use the calculator. If children who choose to use the abacus learn better, then it wouldn't surprise me, but it means that teaching abacus wouldn't help. If that is false and (2) is true, then we know we better off teach abacus (or assembly) -- it doesn't matter when. But if (2) is false, it means that we have a huge trade-off to consider. Because either we teach the hard stuff at the beginning and discourage a lot of students, or we don't and have worse learning outcomes.

abecedarius 10y ago
The post links to a randomized controlled trial. (I only read the abstract.)
MengerSponge 10y ago
Your Assembly/Visual Basic question is going to be badly biased. The barrier to entry with VB is lower, so you'll see more low-skill programmers. This reduces the average competence of the entire cohort, but doesn't tell you anything about the high-skill users. Now if you could show that learning assembly led to better programming skills, you'd be talking about something similar. I suspect that a comparison of introductory programming via assembly vs a modern high-level language would find lower overall proficiency in the assembly group, although a few students would do fine. Personally, I suspect that there isn't anything particularly unique about using an abacus, compared to other manipulation techniques. These are probably all superior to calculators, which are generally awful.

by jimmies 10y ago

abecedarius 10y ago

The post links to a randomized controlled trial. (I only read the abstract.)

MengerSponge 10y ago

Your Assembly/Visual Basic question is going to be badly biased. The barrier to entry with VB is lower, so you'll see more low-skill programmers. This reduces the average competence of the entire cohort, but doesn't tell you anything about the high-skill users. Now if you could show that learning assembly led to better programming skills, you'd be talking about something similar. I suspect that a comparison of introductory programming via assembly vs a modern high-level language would find lower overall proficiency in the assembly group, although a few students would do fine. Personally, I suspect that there isn't anything particularly unique about using an abacus, compared to other manipulation techniques. These are probably all superior to calculators, which are generally awful.