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Schools still make you manually understand math even though calculators have been perfect for decades. Because it turns out having some magic machine spit out a

Schools still make you manually understand math even though calculators have been perfect for decades. Because it turns out having some magic machine spit out an answer you can’t understand isn’t good and you’ll have no ability to understand when and why the answer is incorrect.

jacquesm 1y ago
I think until the third year of high school you should do without a calculator. There really is no substitute for being able to do basic math in your head. It also helps you to later on spot order of magnitude errors and such, as well as to do good first order of approximation estimates.
- dleeftink 1y ago
  I'm a bit different then, maths only started to make sense well after picking up a calculator; Wolfram notebooks, Excel and SQL were much easier for me to grok than attempting the equivalent by heart/head/hand. Nowadays, math concepts or papers only makes sense when I can properly implement them as query, it's somehow a basic translation step I need.
- wrs 1y ago
  In my ninth grade physics class we had to use a slide rule to do calculations for the first three months to help develop that intuition for orders of magnitude. Also because our teacher was just tired of people reporting results to nine significant figures for measurements they made with a meter stick.
  - cratermoon 1y ago
    Oh yeah learning to use slide rule is like a superpower when it comes to understanding orders of magnitude and significant figures. It's also a great way to become very comfortable with logarithms.
xg15 1y ago
I found Factorio being a good paradigm for that. The core game loop is essentially: "Do a task manually, then automate it; then do a higher-level task manually that only became feasible through the automation; then automate that as well, etc etc". But throughout the game, you often drop back down into the lower level tasks, e.g. to understand problems or change the workflow. So in the end an understanding of the entire "stack" of tasks on different abstraction levels is necessary to make progress. This always felt like a good analogy to programming, or really scientific knowledge in general.
- internet_points 1y ago
  Are there any games that teach automation like Factorio but that don't have that depressive dystopian magnasanti feel?
  - jon_richards 1y ago
    Bombe is great. You might like the zactronics games. And there are tons of factory games now if you want factorio with different window dressing.
  - mock-possum 1y ago
    Satisfactory? Or for a different take, magnum opus?
  - drdrey 1y ago
    Dyson Sphere Program and a lot of zachtronics games do that very well
  - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
    Perhaps one of the successors to the original Tekkit mod for Minecraft, like Tekkit SMP? It's one of the Minecraft mods that inspired Factorio.
  - felixhummel 1y ago
    Shapez
  - 1y ago
mafuy 1y ago
I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUpZg-Ua5ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUpZg-Ua5ao

jacquesm 1y ago

I think until the third year of high school you should do without a calculator. There really is no substitute for being able to do basic math in your head. It also helps you to later on spot order of magnitude errors and such, as well as to do good first order of approximation estimates.

dleeftink 1y ago
I'm a bit different then, maths only started to make sense well after picking up a calculator; Wolfram notebooks, Excel and SQL were much easier for me to grok than attempting the equivalent by heart/head/hand. Nowadays, math concepts or papers only makes sense when I can properly implement them as query, it's somehow a basic translation step I need.
wrs 1y ago
In my ninth grade physics class we had to use a slide rule to do calculations for the first three months to help develop that intuition for orders of magnitude. Also because our teacher was just tired of people reporting results to nine significant figures for measurements they made with a meter stick.
- cratermoon 1y ago
  Oh yeah learning to use slide rule is like a superpower when it comes to understanding orders of magnitude and significant figures. It's also a great way to become very comfortable with logarithms.

xg15 1y ago

I found Factorio being a good paradigm for that. The core game loop is essentially: "Do a task manually, then automate it; then do a higher-level task manually that only became feasible through the automation; then automate that as well, etc etc". But throughout the game, you often drop back down into the lower level tasks, e.g. to understand problems or change the workflow. So in the end an understanding of the entire "stack" of tasks on different abstraction levels is necessary to make progress. This always felt like a good analogy to programming, or really scientific knowledge in general.

internet_points 1y ago
Are there any games that teach automation like Factorio but that don't have that depressive dystopian magnasanti feel?
- jon_richards 1y ago
  Bombe is great. You might like the zactronics games. And there are tons of factory games now if you want factorio with different window dressing.
- mock-possum 1y ago
  Satisfactory? Or for a different take, magnum opus?
- drdrey 1y ago
  Dyson Sphere Program and a lot of zachtronics games do that very well
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  Perhaps one of the successors to the original Tekkit mod for Minecraft, like Tekkit SMP? It's one of the Minecraft mods that inspired Factorio.
- felixhummel 1y ago
  Shapez
- 1y ago

mafuy 1y ago

I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUpZg-Ua5ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUpZg-Ua5ao