5 ms·

Same. I really struggle to learn anything which I can't see a practical use for. Just as an example, in high school learning trigonometry was really difficult

by drorco 3y ago

Same. I really struggle to learn anything which I can't see a practical use for. Just as an example, in high school learning trigonometry was really difficult for me, like why would I even care about finding an angle in a triangle, etc.? Only once I studied physics or game dev, this has started to become relevant, and then studying it got SO MUCH easier.

Solvency 3y ago
It's mindboggling to me that every teacher doesn't just debut the subject with videogames as a reference. "Alright everyone, let's make a video game character out of triangles". "Let's make a little cannon that you can change the angle of. How do you calculate the angle? Funny you should ask.." "Now let's learn how you'd make the fireball move up and down as it travels. That's a sine wave!" Every single student understands the basic concept of a game visually, even if they don't play them regularly. It's just a perfect frame of reference and context for applying the concepts in 2D, and then in 3D. And it's so easy to help the students understand how easily those concepts get extrapolated to other things (engineering, sports, whatever).
- grugagag 3y ago
  Back when I studied these videogames were much simpler. I was explained instead calculating areas and volumes for various functions and that was enough for me to get it. The thing is that not everyone was confused and some can take in theory without a practical application. They’re different modes of thinking and I appreciate both, I just happen to fall in the practical group.
- drorco 3y ago
  Totally! One of the first thing I did after learning Newton's law of gravity, was to write down a small simulation of planets in orbit and how they "dance" around each other. This little exercise totally blew my mind and the code was really simple to code. There's probably an untapped opportunity here, but ed-tech is such a difficult industry.
  - chalst 3y ago
    I recall encountering a simple domain-specific PL in school in the late 1980s that allowed physical systems to be easily modelled.
  - poorbutdebtfree 3y ago
    Ed-tech can easily make smart kids smarter but that is a difficult sell to the virtuous.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I'm sure someone actually working in ed-tech will correct me, or perhaps even laugh me out of the room, but I still believe in what I figured out around highschool: that edtech, particularly "educational games", have it all backwards. Kids aren't stupid. If you take the usual boring curriculum with choreful exercises, and try to "make it more fun" by half-heartedly sprinkling in some colors, characters and cheesy stories, it will backfire spectacularly - kids will see you're just trying to trick them, and not even putting much effort into it. The right way is the reverse: you need to make something honestly, inherently fun, but design it so that it educates users/players as a side effect. Take Kerbal Space Program: it's not designed to be an educational game, but it's fun, and models real-world physics well enough that you get 12 years old researching and understanding the math of orbital mechanics, all because they'd like to do better than "point roughly half-turn ahead of the Moon and go full throttle", and they'd like to not run out of fuel on the way. Or, look how Minecraft is tricking kids into learning electronics, boolean logic, low-level programming, etc. (I'd mention Factorio, but I think it's a wash - any gains society gets from the game educating kids are cancelled out by the amount of productivity loss the mere exposure to this game inflicts on software devs.) (EDIT: or, remember Colobot? A very simple third-person perspective game that had you find and refine resources to build robots, which then you used to kill some big bugs. The twist being, instead of controlling the robots like in a shooter, you had an option to program them in a Java-like DSL, inside the game. It was a great way to organically learn programming. The IP owners later made a "fork" of the game, Ceebot, that was pretty much the same, except it focused on teaching you to program robots instead of having fun exploring and shooting stuff. Predictably, that simple change of focus made the game flop.) It doesn't even have to be a game: leave a kid in front of Google Earth, and they'll learn geography much faster and much more thoroughly than they would from a globe or a book. Not because the software is better at teaching, but because the kid is just messing around with a virutal model of Earth, and learning stuff along the way. Etc. Etd. I think it's a tough sell to adults, particularly parents and educators - that if you want to motivate kids to learn, you need to... stop trying to motivate them to learn. Give them something that's honestly fun, involving or benefiting from real-life knowledge and skills, but actually trying to teach them - and then trust that they'll pick that knowledge up on their own.
jerf 3y ago
I would love to have some sort of statistics on what the proportion of this feeling is. My suspicion is that the practical approach is probably about 90% of the population (who is willing to learn math at all). Would be helpful in trying to figure out how to tune learning programs. (I say this as one who is perfectly content to learn the theory directly and with little-to-no practical motivation, but my impression is I'm very much in the minority on that.) I was going to say that the curriculum is tuned in favor of those who can just learn by theory, but then I realized that's not even true. It's tuned in favor of those who will simply swallow it without any idea what it is for; it is neither contextualized in terms of what it is practically good for, nor is it contextualized in terms of theory. It's just... there.
- grugagag 3y ago
  I’d be curious to see that as well. I loved math until it became too abstract for me to grasp so I lost interest in it. And that worked pretty well as a self selection for the field, well, a large part of it. I wouldn’t want to be in the academia anyways…
siftrics 3y ago
> I really struggle to learn anything which I can't see a practical use for. That's a close-minded, ignorant world view. Much of the world's most important advancements were made before any practical use could be seen. Why do you think that way?
- qorrect 3y ago
  > Why do you think that way? Probably the same reason that you're such an ass (genes).
  - siftrics 3y ago
    Sorry man. Just asking an honest question. It's interesting to me that one can hold two opposing ideas and see no issue: - History has demonstrated clear value in discovering and understanding concepts that have no practical use today - One should not care to understand things that have no practical use today Seems bizarre to think both things. That's why I asked.
    - dangerlibrary 3y ago
      You are shadowboxing - fighting an argument nobody is making. Someone is describing their personal experience of the world, not arguing that this is the best way to think about the world. It's an opportunity to learn about the ways that people learn things differently, if you can be curious and kind about it.
      - siftrics 3y ago
        You're right. I could've been kinder. Apologies.
- drorco 3y ago
  It's just the way my mind works and motivated. Motivation is a very elusive feeling that I did not find easy ways to manipulate. It's not as if I'm totally blocked from learning stuff with no clear purpose, but it will require much more mental capacity that is often difficult to muster in the day-to-day routine. Another example, is I did try to learn what I perceive as totally theoretical math such as "prove that there are infinite primary numbers" which was a nice idea to entertain, but it didn't really make me want to dig in further. On the other hand, learning about linear algebra in the context of machine learning, suddenly got Linear Algebra a lot more interesting and easy to learn.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Wonder how many people here have similar story. In primary and secondary school, I had troubles with math - mostly caused by me not doing homework exercises and generally avoiding work (probably an early indication of an issue that took 20 more years to diagnose...). It all changed when I got interested in gamedev - suddenly, I've caught up with most of the material I was bad at, quickly learned trigonometry beyond the secondary school program, and then some basic vector and matrix algebra - and I distinctly remember it all starting with a simple problem: how to make a sprite rotate and move in circles? Couple decades later, I still have a kind of theory+applications mindset: I always seek to generalize and abstract, but I feel lost when presented with a new abstraction without any context. Over the years, I realized I learn and understand things most effectively by seeking out answers to the question: why?. Not in the sense of, "what will I ever use this for?", but in the sense of "why was this invented?", "what were the problems people who invented it were trying to solve?". I trace the topic back in time until I find the point where the "why" and "how" are both apparent, and then go forward from there.

by drorco 3y ago

Solvency 3y ago

It's mindboggling to me that every teacher doesn't just debut the subject with videogames as a reference. "Alright everyone, let's make a video game character out of triangles". "Let's make a little cannon that you can change the angle of. How do you calculate the angle? Funny you should ask.." "Now let's learn how you'd make the fireball move up and down as it travels. That's a sine wave!" Every single student understands the basic concept of a game visually, even if they don't play them regularly. It's just a perfect frame of reference and context for applying the concepts in 2D, and then in 3D. And it's so easy to help the students understand how easily those concepts get extrapolated to other things (engineering, sports, whatever).

grugagag 3y ago
Back when I studied these videogames were much simpler. I was explained instead calculating areas and volumes for various functions and that was enough for me to get it. The thing is that not everyone was confused and some can take in theory without a practical application. They’re different modes of thinking and I appreciate both, I just happen to fall in the practical group.
drorco 3y ago
Totally! One of the first thing I did after learning Newton's law of gravity, was to write down a small simulation of planets in orbit and how they "dance" around each other. This little exercise totally blew my mind and the code was really simple to code. There's probably an untapped opportunity here, but ed-tech is such a difficult industry.
- chalst 3y ago
  I recall encountering a simple domain-specific PL in school in the late 1980s that allowed physical systems to be easily modelled.
- poorbutdebtfree 3y ago
  Ed-tech can easily make smart kids smarter but that is a difficult sell to the virtuous.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I'm sure someone actually working in ed-tech will correct me, or perhaps even laugh me out of the room, but I still believe in what I figured out around highschool: that edtech, particularly "educational games", have it all backwards. Kids aren't stupid. If you take the usual boring curriculum with choreful exercises, and try to "make it more fun" by half-heartedly sprinkling in some colors, characters and cheesy stories, it will backfire spectacularly - kids will see you're just trying to trick them, and not even putting much effort into it. The right way is the reverse: you need to make something honestly, inherently fun, but design it so that it educates users/players as a side effect. Take Kerbal Space Program: it's not designed to be an educational game, but it's fun, and models real-world physics well enough that you get 12 years old researching and understanding the math of orbital mechanics, all because they'd like to do better than "point roughly half-turn ahead of the Moon and go full throttle", and they'd like to not run out of fuel on the way. Or, look how Minecraft is tricking kids into learning electronics, boolean logic, low-level programming, etc. (I'd mention Factorio, but I think it's a wash - any gains society gets from the game educating kids are cancelled out by the amount of productivity loss the mere exposure to this game inflicts on software devs.) (EDIT: or, remember Colobot? A very simple third-person perspective game that had you find and refine resources to build robots, which then you used to kill some big bugs. The twist being, instead of controlling the robots like in a shooter, you had an option to program them in a Java-like DSL, inside the game. It was a great way to organically learn programming. The IP owners later made a "fork" of the game, Ceebot, that was pretty much the same, except it focused on teaching you to program robots instead of having fun exploring and shooting stuff. Predictably, that simple change of focus made the game flop.) It doesn't even have to be a game: leave a kid in front of Google Earth, and they'll learn geography much faster and much more thoroughly than they would from a globe or a book. Not because the software is better at teaching, but because the kid is just messing around with a virutal model of Earth, and learning stuff along the way. Etc. Etd. I think it's a tough sell to adults, particularly parents and educators - that if you want to motivate kids to learn, you need to... stop trying to motivate them to learn. Give them something that's honestly fun, involving or benefiting from real-life knowledge and skills, but actually trying to teach them - and then trust that they'll pick that knowledge up on their own.

jerf 3y ago

I would love to have some sort of statistics on what the proportion of this feeling is. My suspicion is that the practical approach is probably about 90% of the population (who is willing to learn math at all). Would be helpful in trying to figure out how to tune learning programs. (I say this as one who is perfectly content to learn the theory directly and with little-to-no practical motivation, but my impression is I'm very much in the minority on that.) I was going to say that the curriculum is tuned in favor of those who can just learn by theory, but then I realized that's not even true. It's tuned in favor of those who will simply swallow it without any idea what it is for; it is neither contextualized in terms of what it is practically good for, nor is it contextualized in terms of theory. It's just... there.

grugagag 3y ago
I’d be curious to see that as well. I loved math until it became too abstract for me to grasp so I lost interest in it. And that worked pretty well as a self selection for the field, well, a large part of it. I wouldn’t want to be in the academia anyways…

siftrics 3y ago

> I really struggle to learn anything which I can't see a practical use for. That's a close-minded, ignorant world view. Much of the world's most important advancements were made before any practical use could be seen. Why do you think that way?

qorrect 3y ago
> Why do you think that way? Probably the same reason that you're such an ass (genes).
- siftrics 3y ago
  Sorry man. Just asking an honest question. It's interesting to me that one can hold two opposing ideas and see no issue: - History has demonstrated clear value in discovering and understanding concepts that have no practical use today - One should not care to understand things that have no practical use today Seems bizarre to think both things. That's why I asked.
  - dangerlibrary 3y ago
    You are shadowboxing - fighting an argument nobody is making. Someone is describing their personal experience of the world, not arguing that this is the best way to think about the world. It's an opportunity to learn about the ways that people learn things differently, if you can be curious and kind about it.
    - siftrics 3y ago
      You're right. I could've been kinder. Apologies.
drorco 3y ago
It's just the way my mind works and motivated. Motivation is a very elusive feeling that I did not find easy ways to manipulate. It's not as if I'm totally blocked from learning stuff with no clear purpose, but it will require much more mental capacity that is often difficult to muster in the day-to-day routine. Another example, is I did try to learn what I perceive as totally theoretical math such as "prove that there are infinite primary numbers" which was a nice idea to entertain, but it didn't really make me want to dig in further. On the other hand, learning about linear algebra in the context of machine learning, suddenly got Linear Algebra a lot more interesting and easy to learn.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

Wonder how many people here have similar story. In primary and secondary school, I had troubles with math - mostly caused by me not doing homework exercises and generally avoiding work (probably an early indication of an issue that took 20 more years to diagnose...). It all changed when I got interested in gamedev - suddenly, I've caught up with most of the material I was bad at, quickly learned trigonometry beyond the secondary school program, and then some basic vector and matrix algebra - and I distinctly remember it all starting with a simple problem: how to make a sprite rotate and move in circles? Couple decades later, I still have a kind of theory+applications mindset: I always seek to generalize and abstract, but I feel lost when presented with a new abstraction without any context. Over the years, I realized I learn and understand things most effectively by seeking out answers to the question: why?. Not in the sense of, "what will I ever use this for?", but in the sense of "why was this invented?", "what were the problems people who invented it were trying to solve?". I trace the topic back in time until I find the point where the "why" and "how" are both apparent, and then go forward from there.