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I think you could revolutionize education if you did this. Consider this - learning is not about receiving factual information. Rather, it's about transitionin
by dqpb 5y ago
I think you could revolutionize education if you did this.
Consider this - learning is not about receiving factual information. Rather, it's about transitioning through a series of states that take you from being someone who does not know a thing to someone who does.
It's fairly obvious that for most people, receiving a snippet of factual information does not trigger those state transitions! Usually, what does trigger those state transitions is experimentation.
Experimentation increments you through those states. But effectively nobody records those intermediary states and state transitions. Egregiously, services that could sort-of do this, like stack overflow, explicitly do not.
Having that history would provide two things: more relevant information for learners, and data that would be useful for teachers to engineer a better curriculum.
- reidjs 5y agoMaybe I'm a pessimist, but with high-stakes standardized testing I can't see this ever working. Teachers need to optimize their time with students to ensure they are prepared for the test questions.
- mooreds 5y agoPractical question? What do you do in the second year? The teacher can't start from a blank slate: they already know python at that point.
- dqpb 5y agoIdeally you collect the data from students, so you have a constant stream of learner trajectories. Also, if you did this well you could mostly get rid of exams.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smtibor 5y agoIt's a great question. I couldn't learn the basics twice, so what I always tried to do was have something new that I would learn with the students. So for one cohort, I'd learn about Turtle. The next, I'd learn about PyGame Zero. Or we would do new things with CircuitPython boards. The best moments are when students learn something new and blow my mind. I had one student figure out how to make a really elegant Python for loop that would create a full rainbow of RGB colors using the colorsys library. I had been writing this in 5-6 lines of code. She did it in two (plus the library import) for i in range(255): color = colorsys.hsv_to_rgb(i/255, 1.0, 1.0) Not bad for a 6th grader!
- erwincoumans 5y agoYou could play with our PyBullet library, for simple robotics and physics sim/game experiments. It has docs and examples, single line install, and works in a colab: pip install pybullet https://pybullet.org/wordpress/index.php/2021/04/15/pybullet-in-a-colab/ https://pybullet.org/wordpress/index.php/2021/04/15/pybullet... https://docs.google.com/document/d/10sXEhzFRSnvFcl3XxNGhnD4N2SedqwdAvK3dsihxVUA/edit#heading=h.2ye70wns7io3 https://docs.google.com/document/d/10sXEhzFRSnvFcl3XxNGhnD4N... Maybe fun to create some exercise with it.
- smtibor 5y agoYou're hitting on the most important role of a teacher. It's not about providing the answers. It's about guiding the learner through the process of acquiring new knowledge. We did a fascinating episode on the way we learn with Barbara Oakley. (https://www.teachingpython.fm/68 https://www.teachingpython.fm/68). She taught us a lot about how the brain works through acquiring new knowledge and skills. I didn't realize how much of learning is a combination of creating surprising experiences and practicing the skills and behaviors that we want to develop. So when we immediately provide the answers to a learner's question, we're not practicing the behavior of thinking through a problem or experimenting and researching to come up with effective solutions. We also like to practice an iterative process for problem solving that encourages our students to quickly improve their understanding. When we include a reflection on what they learned as part of the process, it's amazing to see how fast they build confidence and competence in the coding. If we just gave them the answers, they're not really learning anything other than to ask us!