5 ms·
A feel for reasonable values, and rough-quantitative understanding, is widely thought important for expertise. Despite the limited attention it usually gets in
by mncharity 2y ago
A feel for reasonable values, and rough-quantitative understanding, is widely thought important for expertise. Despite the limited attention it usually gets in education. But even when instruction is relatively well resourced, as with college seminars devoted entirely to estimation, the content available seems less than inspiring. "Estimate turkey cooking time from first principles, without recourse to wrapper or google"... um, yay? Either we're profoundly confused about utility, or there seems an under-addressed opportunity to gather content which revels in that utility.
If beyond call-and-response, memorize-and-regurgitate, plug-and-chug, problem-based-reasoning, and the-equation-is-the-phenomena, there is something more to aspire to, where quantitative understanding in content is pervasive and foundational, something which illuminates, simplifies, scaffolds, integrates and exercises understanding... then maybe we've a whole lot of content-creation work for the collective todo list?
- mncharity 2y agoDoes anyone know of related work? There's the quantitative introductory biology efforts. There's widespread teaching of order-of-magnitude size, but it's very rarely then leveraged to teach other topics. Any thoughts?
- rramadass 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421792
- mncharity 2y agoThanks. Attempting a categorization, there's TechniqueHowTos and ThemedCollectionsOfFermis. What I've not seen is laying a foundation, of landmarks and relations and characteristics, in support a topical region of Fermiish mastery. Nor leveraging such mastery to then teach other topics more deeply. The common CollectionOfImportantNumbers are sort of landmarks, though there's rarely attention to thorough coverage or memorability. But they are rarely combined with the rest (ATP joules, vs bio bond energy being just above thermal noise, vs energy flux and budgets). Nor say an energy-budget perspective on history of life. Sort of a difference between "you can figure out an isolated Fermi on your own without simply being told the answer" vs say "preK-graduate, you can handle something like a PhD qualifying exam grilling". Between "can sanity check a number", and "have a feel for reasonable numbers", and "have a (necessarily quantitative) feel for the physical world". Between "how long to cook a turkey" and "thermal excursions in bio materials". Between a math-ish approach of "work enough problems and you'll start having a clue", and "outlier-insightful domain expert tutors the richly-interwoven tapestry".
- rramadass 2y agoThere are a few in "A Student's Guide" series from Cambridge University Press which might be what you are looking for, specifically on a) Dimensional Analysis b) Data and Error Analysis c) Numerical Methods - https://www.cambridge.org/in/universitypress/subjects/physics/general-and-classical-physics/series/students-guides https://www.cambridge.org/in/universitypress/subjects/physic...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]