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Right, a student is thinking, "WTF is this quadratic formula for?" might not have gotten much from this. This shows the benefits of the end-game, not the middle
by tibbon 15y ago
Right, a student is thinking, "WTF is this quadratic formula for?" might not have gotten much from this. This shows the benefits of the end-game, not the middle point. Bridging that gap for students I think is the hard part.
- daeken 15y agoI learned the quadratic formula in algebra II (the highest math class I've taken) and promptly forgot it. Then a year or so later, I was writing a raytracer and realized that the ray-sphere intersection is just the quadratic formula. I couldn't help but wonder why we weren't given a single use case for it in school.
- tibbon 15y agoThe only reason I can imagine is that most use cases require other specific knowledge that will also seem like useless stuff to 99% of the students and its hard to find a use case that fits most of their probably interests. "So in the future, when you're writing a ray tracer..." just doesn't ring with most students anymore than the word problems that required the formula either.