3 ms·
Not only coding, but much else in my (Electrical Engineering) college education, was taught as if I was a computer: - my God you cannot use a term without defin
by rossdavidh 7y ago
Not only coding, but much else in my (Electrical Engineering) college education, was taught as if I was a computer:
- my God you cannot use a term without defining it first
- you define the term once, then never again
- always start from a very small, apparently useless example, then build up, only getting to something useful at the very end
This is a great way to program a computer. It is a lousy way to teach a human. Humans are more like machine learning algorithms; give them examples, then later explain the general definitions and syntax.
If machine learning ever becomes a mainstream method of programming, I wonder if it would cause programming instruction to improve? Probably not. The "define first, useful applications last" style of teaching is probably actually based on math and philosophy logic, so there's centuries of inertia there.
- invalidOrTaken 7y agoMath---as in definitions, properties, etc---is a great way to think, but a crappy way to learn.
- rossdavidh 7y agoWell put.
- scarejunba 7y agoInteresting. In Mathematics classes, you usually have what are called 'motivating examples'. For instance, you might take an object and then see that you can't tell something about it, but if you restrict it in a certain way then it starts having certain interesting properties. The difference between a good lecturer and a poor lecturer is often whether they can give you good motivating examples. The textbooks though are frequently as you describe. They execute like a computer program. Hartshorne's Algebraic Geometry is the classic example for me: it takes so much work just to go through each page. Even chapter 1 you have to skip forward to see that you can get the Nullstellensatz before you can come back to see why you're restricting your object in a certain way. This is no way to learn.
- rossdavidh 7y agoHa! My last name is "Hartshorn", I was kind of thrown by your example at first. You are right, though, textbooks may be this way even more often than lecturers.
- p1necone 7y agoI had the same problem in high school math - symbols would be defined once, then the teacher would use them constantly but never explain what they meant again. And the only way to find it again is to thumb through the textbook page by page because the index lists names of concepts, not the arcane runes that correspond to them. Learning to code helped my math ability greatly, now I see sigma and think "for each, add to total".
- groestl 7y ago> give them examples, then later explain the general definitions and syntax. I think it's worth nothing that there are different learning styles, and some people actually enjoy bottom up approaches more.