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One of my subjects at highchool was technical drawing. The teacher was a quite old man who was set on his ways. We would have to draw 3D pieces by hand, using

by otikik 4y ago

One of my subjects at highchool was technical drawing. The teacher was a quite old man who was set on his ways. We would have to draw 3D pieces by hand, using our squares, bevels and compasses, and lining everything with an ink pencil afterwards, and he gave us a lot of homework to do, which he examined for imperfections. I was incredibly bad a it. I would start a drawing, only to discover halfway through it that it didn't fit the sheet of paper I had and I had to change the perspective. My perpendiculars were never perfectly aligned. I would smear blots of ink with my tools and hands. It was excruciating. This is the point where I would usually say that I learned to enjoy the repetition and eventually came to appreciate it and be good at it. But that's not what happened. Instead I started doing my homework using the computer, printing, and then tracing the points by hand. This resulted on cleaner-looking homework and took less time to do. What's surprising perhaps is that it enabled me to appreciate design more, now that I was no longer limited by the drawing technique, which was, I believe, my teacher's real interest (he was a painter outside of school. A very nice person, I didn't enjoy lying to him like that). You might think that this would prevent me from performing well on exams, where a clean enough drawing (done by hand) was expected. The thing is: I could muster the effort to do a one-off drawing that was clean and precise, from time to time. Just not after every lesson. I actually got the maximum qualification on my province's technical drawing examination. This is all to say: I agree with the Author. Once the tools are out there, trying to limit them is pointless. You must adapt your curriculum to the environment your pupils are in. If you don't, they will.

qualudeheart 4y ago
Lying to your teacher is justified if he’s forcing you to suffer through that. Art class is a surprisingly absuvie class when it could be so fun, therapeutic.
TheHypnotist 4y ago
I had to take the same course, sans the cheating, just as a pre-requisite to Auto CAD and whatever it's called now. I'm not sure how drawing by hand helped me, but it is what it is.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  I don't know much about technical drawings by hand. But I am very experienced with AutoCAD. And I cannot appreciate much of what CAD has. On the contrary, having met senior people who took technical drawing, they could appreciate it very much so and were able to teach me concepts that I had a hard time understanding before. Nowadays, when I teach very young people what AutoCAD is, I make them use a mini rolling ruler and tell them to watch youtube videos of how to use a rolling ruler. My understanding of CAD is high enough to know that every tool in CAD was inspired by and modeled after the rolling ruler. Sufficient to say, they understand and enjoy CAD very much after that point.
  - borroka 4y ago
    I disagree. Senior professionals might have a better understanding because they have spent a lot of time drawing, but the specific tool is not relevant. It is like saying that playing tennis with a wooden racket gives you a better "feel" for the ball and therefore is preparatory to using modern rackets. No one does this because it is not true. A similar line of thinking was popular in jiu jitsu, where veterans said that being competent with the gi was necessary to be competent in no-gi. Yet current no-gi winners basically never train with the gi.
    - nashashmi 4y ago
      That is definitely true, that knowing and understanding a tool is not important to actually succeeding with the tool. But it does help a confused person understand why tools are made the way they are. In Fact, Modern programs in CAD do not follow the tools and principles that AutoCAD emphasizes. And those programs have charted a different course where the history and legacy of technical drawings has less relevance. (Case in point: Visio and maybe Powerpoint.)
      - borroka 4y ago
        I would say that there is an overemphasis, although understandable, on the usefulness of what happened or was used before the current state, position or technology. For example, with regard to technical drawing, we might say that using the pencil, the square, and the drafting machine gives an understanding of drawing that the use of the computer cannot. But, for some reason, we don't say that using your finger and sand, or a rock and string to draw a circle helps even more. And we don't say that simply because the people who used rock and string (the good old days) are long dead. The same goes for clothing, for which we say the 1990s, or perhaps the late 1960s, were better, but no one says that between 1900 and 1910 people dressed with such great taste. The same goes for romantic partners ("if he hadn't dumped you and made you cry for a year and a half, you wouldn't have found your wonderful wife/husband"), and many other things. It is very human to rationalize the circumstantial.
martin-adams 4y ago
How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used?
- ghaff 4y ago
  As per my example in another comment, it seems to be extremely easy to detect ChatGPT output today. Indeed, to me, surprisingly so.
  - baq 4y ago
    The default style is such by design. If you ask for very concise, single paragraph answers it gets hard.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Sure, it's going to be harder to run detection on a short snippet. But a short snippet also isn't very useful in the context of writing a school paper for you.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    I don't think it's as easy to detect ChatGPT output as you're making it out to be. Sure, it might be possible to detect it if you know what you're looking for, but to the average person, it's not that obvious.
    - alvah 4y ago
      There are already several services that claim to detect GPTx with high reliability. I’ve been testing originality.ai and it’s success rate at detecting unedited GPT3, Jasper, and ChatGPT output has been 100% so far.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I assume this is being added to the plagiarism detectors as we speak.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
Wasn't the very first point that ChatGPT got the homework answer completely wrong? But I do agree with your overall point, that schools and universities will have to embrace these new tools. Vernor Vinge (who was an SDSU maths professor) wrote Rainbow's End on this very subject.
joe_the_user 4y ago
To put it with maximum extremity, should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class? I mean, human beings have produced a lot of tools for aiding themselves in tasks that were previously done by hand. Whether a given hand-skill should be learned and preserved kind of has to decided on a case-by-case basis. I learned cursive in school and I wouldn't object to that skill being utterly forgotten by humanity. Which is to say that I don't think we should assume all learning should begin without automatic tools at hand or that we should suppress automatic tools. Rather, we need to look carefully at which hand-skills are worthwhile and "uplifting" and how much use of those skills should be required.
- IanCal 4y ago
  It comes down to what the goal is. If it's to learn to draw people, no. If it's to learn composition and this gets you past struggling to draw and onto the actual goal then sure.
- justincormack 4y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis
- spc476 4y ago
  > should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class? I did just that. It wasn't a life drawing class, just a drawing class. And it wasn't homework, but the do-it-at-home final. I photocopied my hand. Then I covered a sheet of paper with ground graphite (turning it all nearly black), and then used an eraser and a light-box to trace my photocopied hand. Did I cheat? Perhaps, but I used tools that I had access to. Did Vermeer cheat? [1] Perhaps, he may have used tools he had access to. Afterwards, I framed that drawing and hung it up at work. It was stolen. Go figure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer
  - miketery 4y ago
    Yes that’s cheating. We don’t give runners roller blades right?
deepspace 4y ago
I did not go to a technical high school and therefore had no opportunity to learn technical drawing in school. When I when to university to study electronics and computer engineering, I had to take technical drawing as a required subject. Needless to say, I sucked at it, and it was the one and only class that I ever failed. I passed with flying colours the second time around, and still graduated in minimum time, though it badly messed up my schedule in my second year. I have never forgiven the department for putting me through that, given that AutoCAD existed at that time.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  You can’t always have your AutoCAD with you when taking measurements off real-world objects. An engineer must be able to draw and write unambiguously.
  - jkestner 4y ago
    I was probably in the last class in my school where we did mostly hand-drawing, including technical drawings. Annoying but found it useful to practice spatial thinking and precise visual communication. Of course, even harder to be ambiguous in CAD.
  - klooney 4y ago
    You really probably could: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/autocad/id393149734 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/autocad/id393149734
darepublic 4y ago
In my technical drawing class for some reason the teacher was such a softie.. that we basically learned nothing. The class had two sections, there was the front part of the classroom with drafting desks and the chalkboard etc, but there was an enclosed space at the back where there was a small computer lab. At some point during the year we all just would go back there and play computer games for the majority of the period. The computers all had games installed, Quake, SNES emulator etc. And we all ended up with As and learned nothing. This was my regrettable curriculum.

by otikik 4y ago

qualudeheart 4y ago

Lying to your teacher is justified if he’s forcing you to suffer through that. Art class is a surprisingly absuvie class when it could be so fun, therapeutic.

TheHypnotist 4y ago

I had to take the same course, sans the cheating, just as a pre-requisite to Auto CAD and whatever it's called now. I'm not sure how drawing by hand helped me, but it is what it is.

nashashmi 4y ago
I don't know much about technical drawings by hand. But I am very experienced with AutoCAD. And I cannot appreciate much of what CAD has. On the contrary, having met senior people who took technical drawing, they could appreciate it very much so and were able to teach me concepts that I had a hard time understanding before. Nowadays, when I teach very young people what AutoCAD is, I make them use a mini rolling ruler and tell them to watch youtube videos of how to use a rolling ruler. My understanding of CAD is high enough to know that every tool in CAD was inspired by and modeled after the rolling ruler. Sufficient to say, they understand and enjoy CAD very much after that point.
- borroka 4y ago
  I disagree. Senior professionals might have a better understanding because they have spent a lot of time drawing, but the specific tool is not relevant. It is like saying that playing tennis with a wooden racket gives you a better "feel" for the ball and therefore is preparatory to using modern rackets. No one does this because it is not true. A similar line of thinking was popular in jiu jitsu, where veterans said that being competent with the gi was necessary to be competent in no-gi. Yet current no-gi winners basically never train with the gi.
  - nashashmi 4y ago
    That is definitely true, that knowing and understanding a tool is not important to actually succeeding with the tool. But it does help a confused person understand why tools are made the way they are. In Fact, Modern programs in CAD do not follow the tools and principles that AutoCAD emphasizes. And those programs have charted a different course where the history and legacy of technical drawings has less relevance. (Case in point: Visio and maybe Powerpoint.)
    - borroka 4y ago
      I would say that there is an overemphasis, although understandable, on the usefulness of what happened or was used before the current state, position or technology. For example, with regard to technical drawing, we might say that using the pencil, the square, and the drafting machine gives an understanding of drawing that the use of the computer cannot. But, for some reason, we don't say that using your finger and sand, or a rock and string to draw a circle helps even more. And we don't say that simply because the people who used rock and string (the good old days) are long dead. The same goes for clothing, for which we say the 1990s, or perhaps the late 1960s, were better, but no one says that between 1900 and 1910 people dressed with such great taste. The same goes for romantic partners ("if he hadn't dumped you and made you cry for a year and a half, you wouldn't have found your wonderful wife/husband"), and many other things. It is very human to rationalize the circumstantial.

martin-adams 4y ago

How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used?

ghaff 4y ago
As per my example in another comment, it seems to be extremely easy to detect ChatGPT output today. Indeed, to me, surprisingly so.
- baq 4y ago
  The default style is such by design. If you ask for very concise, single paragraph answers it gets hard.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Sure, it's going to be harder to run detection on a short snippet. But a short snippet also isn't very useful in the context of writing a school paper for you.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  I don't think it's as easy to detect ChatGPT output as you're making it out to be. Sure, it might be possible to detect it if you know what you're looking for, but to the average person, it's not that obvious.
  - alvah 4y ago
    There are already several services that claim to detect GPTx with high reliability. I’ve been testing originality.ai and it’s success rate at detecting unedited GPT3, Jasper, and ChatGPT output has been 100% so far.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I assume this is being added to the plagiarism detectors as we speak.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

Wasn't the very first point that ChatGPT got the homework answer completely wrong? But I do agree with your overall point, that schools and universities will have to embrace these new tools. Vernor Vinge (who was an SDSU maths professor) wrote Rainbow's End on this very subject.

joe_the_user 4y ago

To put it with maximum extremity, should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class? I mean, human beings have produced a lot of tools for aiding themselves in tasks that were previously done by hand. Whether a given hand-skill should be learned and preserved kind of has to decided on a case-by-case basis. I learned cursive in school and I wouldn't object to that skill being utterly forgotten by humanity. Which is to say that I don't think we should assume all learning should begin without automatic tools at hand or that we should suppress automatic tools. Rather, we need to look carefully at which hand-skills are worthwhile and "uplifting" and how much use of those skills should be required.

IanCal 4y ago
It comes down to what the goal is. If it's to learn to draw people, no. If it's to learn composition and this gets you past struggling to draw and onto the actual goal then sure.
justincormack 4y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis
spc476 4y ago
> should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class? I did just that. It wasn't a life drawing class, just a drawing class. And it wasn't homework, but the do-it-at-home final. I photocopied my hand. Then I covered a sheet of paper with ground graphite (turning it all nearly black), and then used an eraser and a light-box to trace my photocopied hand. Did I cheat? Perhaps, but I used tools that I had access to. Did Vermeer cheat? [1] Perhaps, he may have used tools he had access to. Afterwards, I framed that drawing and hung it up at work. It was stolen. Go figure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer
- miketery 4y ago
  Yes that’s cheating. We don’t give runners roller blades right?

deepspace 4y ago

I did not go to a technical high school and therefore had no opportunity to learn technical drawing in school. When I when to university to study electronics and computer engineering, I had to take technical drawing as a required subject. Needless to say, I sucked at it, and it was the one and only class that I ever failed. I passed with flying colours the second time around, and still graduated in minimum time, though it badly messed up my schedule in my second year. I have never forgiven the department for putting me through that, given that AutoCAD existed at that time.

eurasiantiger 4y ago
You can’t always have your AutoCAD with you when taking measurements off real-world objects. An engineer must be able to draw and write unambiguously.
- jkestner 4y ago
  I was probably in the last class in my school where we did mostly hand-drawing, including technical drawings. Annoying but found it useful to practice spatial thinking and precise visual communication. Of course, even harder to be ambiguous in CAD.
- klooney 4y ago
  You really probably could: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/autocad/id393149734 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/autocad/id393149734

darepublic 4y ago

In my technical drawing class for some reason the teacher was such a softie.. that we basically learned nothing. The class had two sections, there was the front part of the classroom with drafting desks and the chalkboard etc, but there was an enclosed space at the back where there was a small computer lab. At some point during the year we all just would go back there and play computer games for the majority of the period. The computers all had games installed, Quake, SNES emulator etc. And we all ended up with As and learned nothing. This was my regrettable curriculum.