6 ms·

I looked at the example for computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in food. Explanations include: "a list can be used for a recipe" "a set can be

by Imnimo 1y ago

I looked at the example for computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in food. Explanations include: "a list can be used for a recipe" "a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals" "a map can be used for a cookbook" "a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen" "a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together" Maybe I'm over-estimating the taste of 7th graders, but I feel like I would get sick of this really quickly.

apwell23 1y ago
yea this is stupid . agreed. I don't know when these dorks will understand that education isn't a technical problem. Its a social and emotional problem. existing material is clear enough to learn from.
- Mtinie 1y ago
  It’s both. Technology is a component (I’d we wouldn’t have books, recorded videos, multimedia aids, etc.).
  - mattlutze 1y ago
    Technology is a tool to expand the possible ways to educate, but isn't necessary for education to happen. i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks. Education itself isn't primarily a technology problem. Treating it as such is an administrative failure, as is pursuing a technological solution in many scenarios that are first social in nature.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - squigz 1y ago
      > i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks. By using the tools available at the time we did, certainly. That involves physical tools like writing, but also non-physical tools like better ways of conveying and disseminating information, better ways of testing the efficacy of various approaches, etc, etc. Education has to evolve, as it always has. While I'm not sure TFA is it, I do think LLMs will have a role to play in making learning more accessible and enjoyable for everyone, not just kids.
      - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
        FWIW, I find the classic texts of certain fields much more intelligible than the intellectually shoddy 56th iteration of some overpriced glossy Pearson textbook. Compare a typical chemistry textbook with something like Pauling's "General Chemistry" which you can get from Dover, modulo any dated information. You will walk away with a far more solid grasp of the basic principles. A lot of the failure of learning is a failure of teaching. Incompetent teachers throw disconnected information at you instead of trying to explain or lead you to an understanding of what something is about. I attribute part of this to a loss of solid philosophical coursework where you are taught to think from first principles, taught within a larger integral context, and taught to reason clearly. It used to be the case that everyone with a college degree had at least some basic philosophy under their belts (compare a Heisenberg to a Feynman to a Krauss; the progression is clear). And don't forget the success of the trivium and quadrivium or some variation of them that was often presupposed and prepared students for intellectual work.
        squigz 1y ago
        I don't disagree with anything you're saying, really; education has been broken by things like too strong an emphasis on test scores, credentials, etc. This not only produces students who don't know how to learn properly, but those students then go on to become teachers who can't learn how to teach properly. That said, teaching is hard. I don't fully blame teachers who cannot effectively convey subjects to 30 kids, especially these days. Even in an ideal situation, there's so much variance in how people learn best, that it would be hard to blame it on incompetence if a teacher cannot reach every one of their students. Considering how hard it's going to be to fix the bigger problems with society* - obsession with credentials, lack of funding, better paying, less stressful jobs means less teachers, etc, etc - shouldn't we embrace tools that help kids learn things in a more accessible way to them? As I said, I don't think TFA is it, and we should obviously be aware of the issues, but surely people on HN of all places can see the value in tailoring subjects and lessons to a student's preferred method of learning? * This is not to say we shouldn't also try to solve those problems
      - mattlutze 1y ago
        > By using the tools available at the time we did, certainly. Yes, tools which help. But the point is that education occurs with any collection of tools, or even the simplest of all, if we want to go so broad as to call speech technology. Technology is an augmenter of education, but not the fundamental problem of education. > I do think I'm not sure whether they should have a role, or what that roll should be, as such a feeling would be moralizing to some degree. But I agree that we will _make_ LLMs have a role, because the capitalism that drives our societies wants them to have a role.
    - SgtBastard 1y ago
      Nitpick: Language is technology, it’s not something we’re genetically born with and is critical for education to happen.
    - groby_b 1y ago
      > i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks. And we've been doing a pretty crappy job educating people without written texts. The written word led to a tremendous acceleration of knowledge transmission. The printing press enabled that transmission at a larger, but unified, scale. Anything we even remotely recognize as science has only ever been practiced by literate cultures. Discarding technology for education because it's not a panacea is an absolute failure as educator.
  - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    Technology can help, but in recent history, there's a track record of bogus pedagogy that insists on incorporating technology without any sound justification. Some of this was motivated by corporations trying to sell shit (like computers), some by silly or clueless teachers and administrators. Some of it is informed by dubious pedagogical methodologies like gamification. For the most part, it's a matter of clear presentation, student engagement, and effort. A well-written textbook (many suck) and a good teacher (same) and a properly disposed student (which presupposes things like certain virtues; parents are responsible for teaching and supporting these for the most part). Technology won't get around the basic human reality, and sometimes, there's nothing to fix. Some people aren't interested.
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  Theres a reason why theres a grave yard of Google's dead projects. Its annoying that software is such a high gross margin industry - I would love to see Googles cash get taken away so they cant take these vanity projects.
  - golem14 1y ago
    There's a _huge_ cottage industry of edu apps and programs that are both hugely expensive and not better at teaching, consuming a lot VC and end user $$$. As a first step, this seems not bad at all. I do agree that it would be better to dial in on a pupil's interest than the grade level (my kid may be 7th grade in English but 9th grade in Chemistry, for instance.) [Edit: fix typo]
  - blibble 1y ago
    if the US government had done its job and split google's monopolistic ad business into what should be 4 different companies, then we wouldn't have this problem
    - rhetocj23 1y ago
      The average ROIC is doing a nice job in compensating for their awful marginal ROIC.
floatrock 1y ago
It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea -- find what they like and explain the concepts with custom-tailored analogues. I don't think the failure mode here is really "7th graders will see through the superficiality of this really quick". I think the failure mode here will be: > Explain computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in poop and butt-sniffing Although who knows... maybe this will unleash a generation of memes of the likes we have never seen before. And if the side-effect is more people are at least conversant in more topics, well, maybe that's not a failure mode at all
- non_aligned 1y ago
  > It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea But... which kids? Do we have a fundamental problem reaching kids who are interested in basketball? My kid had a period of being interested in dinosaurs, but I never felt the need to reframe everything in dinosaur-terms because of that. In fact, you kinda want them to broaden their horizons beyond dinosaurs? The real challenges in education are elsewhere, and a lot of it has to do with socioeconomic status and bad influences early in life.
  - rhetocj23 1y ago
    "a lot of it has to do with socioeconomic status and bad influences early in life." Haha, you think most Googlers understand this? No chance. This is why products like this fail, dead on arrival - the person leading the charge simply doesnt get it. But hey go ahead and burn the cash of shareholders.
joshvm 1y ago
I'm sure computer science has improved in high school over the last (gulp) 20 years, but when I did variations of IT and programming lessons before university, it was bad. This was peak "you must Microsoft Office"-era. I've been involved in outreach for almost as long at this point. A lot of kids ask sensible questions like 'when do I ever need to use trig in real life?', because the examples in lessons and exams are so divorced from reality that it feels pointless. I do think there is pedagogical value in showing where these concepts can be used practically and the advantage of LLMs is that you can transform the examples to what you're actually interested in. For example the Red Blob Games series on A* pathfinding are really good at showing how Dijkstra and graph traversal algorithms work, for a use-case (video games) that is appealing to a lot of nerdy people.
- CodeMage 1y ago
  "When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% sure I will need in my day-to-day life" is a sensible question, when it really isn't. Outside of my 2-year stint in the game development industry, I never really needed most of what I learned about trigonometry in my day-to-day life. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful. Yes, we should make the subject matter more approachable to kids, but we should also try to shift the paradigm so that kids are more open to learning new things.
  - ksenzee 1y ago
    If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.
    - 1y ago
j45 1y ago
This is a start, not the end. Instruction and instructors won't be going away. Most people have never looked at textbooks needing evolving. It's like the LLM ai shift to not think about how software used to be.
amsilprotag 1y ago
I have used the quiz-making learning tool within gemini. It is very good for things that would exist in a typical K-12 textbook. The first 30 or 40 multiple choice questions on a subject are usually pretty good and useful. But then it will tend to repeat multiple choice answers, give strictly wrong answers, repeat questions, or offer multiple valid answers. The answer explanations are what you'd expect with little human QA. Still a useful tool for people who sanity-check the given answers, but it might do more harm than good if people don't follow up on their confusion.
iLoveOncall 1y ago
My issue with that it's more that those are extremely poor analogies. The first 3 are simply plain wrong. GenAI's gonna GenAI I guess.
- CodeMage 1y ago
  Okay, maybe I'm dumb, but I don't get how the first 3 are "simply plain wrong". They're open-ended enough that I have no trouble imagining how you could use those 3 data structures for those 3 purposes, so I must be missing some aspect of what you're trying to say.
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    It's not that they cannot be used. You can use any data structure for any purpose if you torture it enough. It's that the metaphors are terrible. > "a list can be used for a recipe" A recipe is not just a list of steps, it's also a list of ingredients, potentially an introduction, some pictures, etc. Ask a kid to draw you a mock recipe, you won't just get a list of steps in return. > "a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals" Ingredients have quantities attached. If I tell you to make a cake you need sugar, an egg and flour and give you all the steps but no quantities, you're not making a cake. A map is the obvious choice for storing ingredients. I agree that ingredients are unique, but they have attached data which is just as relevant as the ingredient itself. > "a map can be used for a cookbook" I just don't understand how a cookbook is supposed to represent a map, it just doesn't make sense, not even with the additional context of the previous metaphors. At best it would be somewhat understandable if it said a map can be used for a cookbook, with dish names mapping to recipes, but even this would be a stretch and assume a dish can be made in a single way. Keep in mind the goal is to teach someone who has zero ideas about datastructures what they are, not to give some analogies to an experienced software engineer.
    - recursivecaveat 1y ago
      My beef with the list is what does "a list can be used for a list of steps" explain? Feels like the sort of thing you nod along too and then wake up the next day realizing you didn't learn anything at all.
raincole 1y ago
> "a list can be used for a recipe" I don't even know what it means, tbh. I feel it's going to confuse the hell out of 7th graders.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  How is that difficult to understand? A recipe is an ordered list of steps of what to do. So of course a list can be used for a recipe. I personally prefer a serious text without bringing in unrelated concepts like food, but this is still understandable.
  - non_aligned 1y ago
    I think it's just clunky, like "a pencil can be used for a recipe". My first take is "wait, are we cooking a pencil? or stirring with it?" The first meaning of "use for a recipe" is "use as an ingredient." But then, it's a pretty weird thing to explain to begin with, approximately every human on the planet knows what the word "list" means. So what does this pseudo-definition add?
    - a96 1y ago
      Well, this list (heh) was cs concepts or data structures. Most humans on the planet definitely don't know what a linked list is or how it's used, let alone how it's implemented. The cooking analogy is trying to bridge that gap a little. I don't think it's good either. You'll mostly get the meaning if you already knew it.
  - layer8 1y ago
    You have to already have a good understanding of the concept that is meant by “list” here, in order to make sense of that sentence. And even then it might not be clear that the list would be used to represent the recipe. This does almost nothing to explain what a “list” is in the CS sense. Teaching material needs to show how a list could be used for a recipe, and from that the student might begin to form a first incomplete understanding of what a “list” is.
  - 1y ago
duskwuff 1y ago
The Hawthorne effect[1] (aka "novelty effect") comes to mind. Even if students report finding this style of content more engaging after a single session, is that actually because it's better, or just because it's different? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
miki123211 1y ago
Gemini is extremely fond of this writing style. If you ask it to explain some complex algorithm, it'll go "imagine a football field..." If you tell it you're a college-educated software engineer in the system prompt and ask it a non-cs question, it will go "imagine a variable..." instead.
selvan 1y ago
May be personalization for narration ?. Different narration style, based on their own interest. edit: Their demo video shows they allow learners to set different narration style based on their interest.
ookdatnog 1y ago
Especially the set example is also just confusing for 7th grade kids (or anyone who doesn't already understand sets, really). It's technically correct to say that you can store the unique ingredients of a recipe in a set, but that's not an obviously useful thing to do (if you want to compose a shopping list, you need the quantities as well), so the example doesn't actually illustrate anything that helps make sets more intuitive to the student. I think many, if not most, kids of that age will also not even correctly parse the phrasing "list all the unique ingredients" (not to speak of the unfortunate phrasing "a set can be used to list all ..." while you're trying to illustrate the difference between a list and a set).
legacynl 1y ago
At first glance this seems fine, but pondering it for a moment, I think this is pretty bad. These analogies don't fully make sense. Also they kind of work on their own, but they clash together. A map is the same as a cookbook, and a list is the same as a recipe. A cookbooks contains recipes, so a map contains lists?

by Imnimo 1y ago

apwell23 1y ago

yea this is stupid . agreed. I don't know when these dorks will understand that education isn't a technical problem. Its a social and emotional problem. existing material is clear enough to learn from.

Mtinie 1y ago
It’s both. Technology is a component (I’d we wouldn’t have books, recorded videos, multimedia aids, etc.).
- mattlutze 1y ago
  Technology is a tool to expand the possible ways to educate, but isn't necessary for education to happen. i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks. Education itself isn't primarily a technology problem. Treating it as such is an administrative failure, as is pursuing a technological solution in many scenarios that are first social in nature.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - squigz 1y ago
    > i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks. By using the tools available at the time we did, certainly. That involves physical tools like writing, but also non-physical tools like better ways of conveying and disseminating information, better ways of testing the efficacy of various approaches, etc, etc. Education has to evolve, as it always has. While I'm not sure TFA is it, I do think LLMs will have a role to play in making learning more accessible and enjoyable for everyone, not just kids.
    - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
      FWIW, I find the classic texts of certain fields much more intelligible than the intellectually shoddy 56th iteration of some overpriced glossy Pearson textbook. Compare a typical chemistry textbook with something like Pauling's "General Chemistry" which you can get from Dover, modulo any dated information. You will walk away with a far more solid grasp of the basic principles. A lot of the failure of learning is a failure of teaching. Incompetent teachers throw disconnected information at you instead of trying to explain or lead you to an understanding of what something is about. I attribute part of this to a loss of solid philosophical coursework where you are taught to think from first principles, taught within a larger integral context, and taught to reason clearly. It used to be the case that everyone with a college degree had at least some basic philosophy under their belts (compare a Heisenberg to a Feynman to a Krauss; the progression is clear). And don't forget the success of the trivium and quadrivium or some variation of them that was often presupposed and prepared students for intellectual work.
      - squigz 1y ago
        I don't disagree with anything you're saying, really; education has been broken by things like too strong an emphasis on test scores, credentials, etc. This not only produces students who don't know how to learn properly, but those students then go on to become teachers who can't learn how to teach properly. That said, teaching is hard. I don't fully blame teachers who cannot effectively convey subjects to 30 kids, especially these days. Even in an ideal situation, there's so much variance in how people learn best, that it would be hard to blame it on incompetence if a teacher cannot reach every one of their students. Considering how hard it's going to be to fix the bigger problems with society* - obsession with credentials, lack of funding, better paying, less stressful jobs means less teachers, etc, etc - shouldn't we embrace tools that help kids learn things in a more accessible way to them? As I said, I don't think TFA is it, and we should obviously be aware of the issues, but surely people on HN of all places can see the value in tailoring subjects and lessons to a student's preferred method of learning? * This is not to say we shouldn't also try to solve those problems
    - mattlutze 1y ago
      > By using the tools available at the time we did, certainly. Yes, tools which help. But the point is that education occurs with any collection of tools, or even the simplest of all, if we want to go so broad as to call speech technology. Technology is an augmenter of education, but not the fundamental problem of education. > I do think I'm not sure whether they should have a role, or what that roll should be, as such a feeling would be moralizing to some degree. But I agree that we will _make_ LLMs have a role, because the capitalism that drives our societies wants them to have a role.
  - SgtBastard 1y ago
    Nitpick: Language is technology, it’s not something we’re genetically born with and is critical for education to happen.
  - groby_b 1y ago
    > i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks. And we've been doing a pretty crappy job educating people without written texts. The written word led to a tremendous acceleration of knowledge transmission. The printing press enabled that transmission at a larger, but unified, scale. Anything we even remotely recognize as science has only ever been practiced by literate cultures. Discarding technology for education because it's not a panacea is an absolute failure as educator.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  Technology can help, but in recent history, there's a track record of bogus pedagogy that insists on incorporating technology without any sound justification. Some of this was motivated by corporations trying to sell shit (like computers), some by silly or clueless teachers and administrators. Some of it is informed by dubious pedagogical methodologies like gamification. For the most part, it's a matter of clear presentation, student engagement, and effort. A well-written textbook (many suck) and a good teacher (same) and a properly disposed student (which presupposes things like certain virtues; parents are responsible for teaching and supporting these for the most part). Technology won't get around the basic human reality, and sometimes, there's nothing to fix. Some people aren't interested.
rhetocj23 1y ago
Theres a reason why theres a grave yard of Google's dead projects. Its annoying that software is such a high gross margin industry - I would love to see Googles cash get taken away so they cant take these vanity projects.
- golem14 1y ago
  There's a _huge_ cottage industry of edu apps and programs that are both hugely expensive and not better at teaching, consuming a lot VC and end user $$$. As a first step, this seems not bad at all. I do agree that it would be better to dial in on a pupil's interest than the grade level (my kid may be 7th grade in English but 9th grade in Chemistry, for instance.) [Edit: fix typo]
- blibble 1y ago
  if the US government had done its job and split google's monopolistic ad business into what should be 4 different companies, then we wouldn't have this problem
  - rhetocj23 1y ago
    The average ROIC is doing a nice job in compensating for their awful marginal ROIC.

floatrock 1y ago

It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea -- find what they like and explain the concepts with custom-tailored analogues. I don't think the failure mode here is really "7th graders will see through the superficiality of this really quick". I think the failure mode here will be: > Explain computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in poop and butt-sniffing Although who knows... maybe this will unleash a generation of memes of the likes we have never seen before. And if the side-effect is more people are at least conversant in more topics, well, maybe that's not a failure mode at all

non_aligned 1y ago
> It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea But... which kids? Do we have a fundamental problem reaching kids who are interested in basketball? My kid had a period of being interested in dinosaurs, but I never felt the need to reframe everything in dinosaur-terms because of that. In fact, you kinda want them to broaden their horizons beyond dinosaurs? The real challenges in education are elsewhere, and a lot of it has to do with socioeconomic status and bad influences early in life.
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  "a lot of it has to do with socioeconomic status and bad influences early in life." Haha, you think most Googlers understand this? No chance. This is why products like this fail, dead on arrival - the person leading the charge simply doesnt get it. But hey go ahead and burn the cash of shareholders.

joshvm 1y ago

I'm sure computer science has improved in high school over the last (gulp) 20 years, but when I did variations of IT and programming lessons before university, it was bad. This was peak "you must Microsoft Office"-era. I've been involved in outreach for almost as long at this point. A lot of kids ask sensible questions like 'when do I ever need to use trig in real life?', because the examples in lessons and exams are so divorced from reality that it feels pointless. I do think there is pedagogical value in showing where these concepts can be used practically and the advantage of LLMs is that you can transform the examples to what you're actually interested in. For example the Red Blob Games series on A* pathfinding are really good at showing how Dijkstra and graph traversal algorithms work, for a use-case (video games) that is appealing to a lot of nerdy people.

CodeMage 1y ago
"When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% sure I will need in my day-to-day life" is a sensible question, when it really isn't. Outside of my 2-year stint in the game development industry, I never really needed most of what I learned about trigonometry in my day-to-day life. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful. Yes, we should make the subject matter more approachable to kids, but we should also try to shift the paradigm so that kids are more open to learning new things.
- ksenzee 1y ago
  If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.
  - 1y ago

j45 1y ago

This is a start, not the end. Instruction and instructors won't be going away. Most people have never looked at textbooks needing evolving. It's like the LLM ai shift to not think about how software used to be.

amsilprotag 1y ago

I have used the quiz-making learning tool within gemini. It is very good for things that would exist in a typical K-12 textbook. The first 30 or 40 multiple choice questions on a subject are usually pretty good and useful. But then it will tend to repeat multiple choice answers, give strictly wrong answers, repeat questions, or offer multiple valid answers. The answer explanations are what you'd expect with little human QA. Still a useful tool for people who sanity-check the given answers, but it might do more harm than good if people don't follow up on their confusion.

iLoveOncall 1y ago

My issue with that it's more that those are extremely poor analogies. The first 3 are simply plain wrong. GenAI's gonna GenAI I guess.

CodeMage 1y ago
Okay, maybe I'm dumb, but I don't get how the first 3 are "simply plain wrong". They're open-ended enough that I have no trouble imagining how you could use those 3 data structures for those 3 purposes, so I must be missing some aspect of what you're trying to say.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  It's not that they cannot be used. You can use any data structure for any purpose if you torture it enough. It's that the metaphors are terrible. > "a list can be used for a recipe" A recipe is not just a list of steps, it's also a list of ingredients, potentially an introduction, some pictures, etc. Ask a kid to draw you a mock recipe, you won't just get a list of steps in return. > "a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals" Ingredients have quantities attached. If I tell you to make a cake you need sugar, an egg and flour and give you all the steps but no quantities, you're not making a cake. A map is the obvious choice for storing ingredients. I agree that ingredients are unique, but they have attached data which is just as relevant as the ingredient itself. > "a map can be used for a cookbook" I just don't understand how a cookbook is supposed to represent a map, it just doesn't make sense, not even with the additional context of the previous metaphors. At best it would be somewhat understandable if it said a map can be used for a cookbook, with dish names mapping to recipes, but even this would be a stretch and assume a dish can be made in a single way. Keep in mind the goal is to teach someone who has zero ideas about datastructures what they are, not to give some analogies to an experienced software engineer.
  - recursivecaveat 1y ago
    My beef with the list is what does "a list can be used for a list of steps" explain? Feels like the sort of thing you nod along too and then wake up the next day realizing you didn't learn anything at all.

raincole 1y ago

> "a list can be used for a recipe" I don't even know what it means, tbh. I feel it's going to confuse the hell out of 7th graders.

kccqzy 1y ago
How is that difficult to understand? A recipe is an ordered list of steps of what to do. So of course a list can be used for a recipe. I personally prefer a serious text without bringing in unrelated concepts like food, but this is still understandable.
- non_aligned 1y ago
  I think it's just clunky, like "a pencil can be used for a recipe". My first take is "wait, are we cooking a pencil? or stirring with it?" The first meaning of "use for a recipe" is "use as an ingredient." But then, it's a pretty weird thing to explain to begin with, approximately every human on the planet knows what the word "list" means. So what does this pseudo-definition add?
  - a96 1y ago
    Well, this list (heh) was cs concepts or data structures. Most humans on the planet definitely don't know what a linked list is or how it's used, let alone how it's implemented. The cooking analogy is trying to bridge that gap a little. I don't think it's good either. You'll mostly get the meaning if you already knew it.
- layer8 1y ago
  You have to already have a good understanding of the concept that is meant by “list” here, in order to make sense of that sentence. And even then it might not be clear that the list would be used to represent the recipe. This does almost nothing to explain what a “list” is in the CS sense. Teaching material needs to show how a list could be used for a recipe, and from that the student might begin to form a first incomplete understanding of what a “list” is.
- 1y ago

duskwuff 1y ago

The Hawthorne effect[1] (aka "novelty effect") comes to mind. Even if students report finding this style of content more engaging after a single session, is that actually because it's better, or just because it's different? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

miki123211 1y ago

Gemini is extremely fond of this writing style. If you ask it to explain some complex algorithm, it'll go "imagine a football field..." If you tell it you're a college-educated software engineer in the system prompt and ask it a non-cs question, it will go "imagine a variable..." instead.

selvan 1y ago

May be personalization for narration ?. Different narration style, based on their own interest. edit: Their demo video shows they allow learners to set different narration style based on their interest.

ookdatnog 1y ago

Especially the set example is also just confusing for 7th grade kids (or anyone who doesn't already understand sets, really). It's technically correct to say that you can store the unique ingredients of a recipe in a set, but that's not an obviously useful thing to do (if you want to compose a shopping list, you need the quantities as well), so the example doesn't actually illustrate anything that helps make sets more intuitive to the student. I think many, if not most, kids of that age will also not even correctly parse the phrasing "list all the unique ingredients" (not to speak of the unfortunate phrasing "a set can be used to list all ..." while you're trying to illustrate the difference between a list and a set).

legacynl 1y ago

At first glance this seems fine, but pondering it for a moment, I think this is pretty bad. These analogies don't fully make sense. Also they kind of work on their own, but they clash together. A map is the same as a cookbook, and a list is the same as a recipe. A cookbooks contains recipes, so a map contains lists?