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Need to refresh your math skills? From basic algebra to calculus and beyond.

khanacademy.org

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Re: Need to refresh your math skills? From basic algebra to calculus and beyond.

#11

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

oscardelben wrote: post #10
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, just to provide a single example, my wife is totally disinterested in games. Absolutely doesn't care, to the point where if someone tries to motivate topic X via games she ends up feeling that topic X cannot have any value to her at all. By contrast, she is very interested in math, and wishes that at school it had been presented as other than a collection of facts to memorize and processes to learn and apply. I…

At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games. Of course you can never satisfy everyone, but that's not a good reason IMO to not do anything just because a few people might not like it.

  > At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games.
"People" or "boys" ?? I'd be interested to know your basis for your assertion, and now that the question has been raised I'll start taking informal polls as I go out and give talks. I do about 90 talks a year, and I'll see what the feedback is.

And in what aspect of games? Being interested in playing various games is not the same as caring how they work, or caring about the idea that math is used in them. I'm not saying that games can't or shouldn't be used as motivation, but I have grave doubts as to the ubiquity of the appeal that people here seem to be taking for granted. To some extent it's the extremity of the view to which I'm objecting.

chaosmachine earlier said:

  > All math classes should incorporate game programming
I really can't believe that such an extreme view is a good thing. It would be akin to saying: Actually math isn't interesting in its own right, we really just need it to write really cool games.

Leaving aside that particular comment, I still think that tying math only to applications is a bad thing. Motivation is essential, yes, but sometimes there's math that arises from the math, and only finds application much later, if ever.

In short, my personal feeling is that you're wrong that the vast majority of kids would be motivated by games, but I have no stats to back that up, just 25 years of giving talks to school kids. Majority, maybe. Substantial proportion, probably.

Far better to get the motivation by using math in a wide, wide range of applications. It's motivation at all, and the sheer breadth that really matters.

Re: Need to refresh your math skills? From basic algebra to calculus and beyond.

#12

Post by chaosmachine »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #11
oscardelben wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games. Of course you can never satisfy everyone, but that's not a good reason IMO to not do anything just because a few people might not like it.

> At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games. "People" or "boys" ?? I'd be interested to know your basis for your assertion, and now that the question has been raised I'll start taking informal polls as I go out and give talks. I do about 90 talks a year, and I'll see what the feedback is. And in what aspect of games? Being interested in playing various games is not the same as caring how t…

chaosmachine earlier said: All math classes should incorporate game programming

Just to clarify, that was kind of a joke. At least, it wasn't meant to be taken as an all or nothing extremist demand.

If I was going to rewrite that comment, knowing it would be taken literally, it might read something more like:

All math classes should incorporate fun "real world" applications, beyond just theory. More people would pay attention.

Re: Need to refresh your math skills? From basic algebra to calculus and beyond.

#14

Post by edw519 »

With just a computer and a pen-tablet-mouse, one can educate the world!

I'll say. Someone's been very busy. Thank you, Khan.

This appears to be an excellent resource. The 10 to 15 minute "bite-sized" pieces make it easy to check something out in your spare time. Most definitely bookmarked.

I also like how he has added a lot of business/finance stuff, which should probably interest a lot of people here. Looks like a slight change of plans today - I have to check more of this out.

[EDIT: I watched several videos in the Venture Capital and Capital Markets section. Definitely worth my while. This teacher appears to be able to make any topic, regardless of complexity, easy to understand. He even has a "happy cursor", which reminds me of football quarterback Peyton Manning's feet when he's getting ready to throw a pass. Funny how you can tell when an expert is in the zone. I'm going to put together a schedule to watch a whole bunch of these videos.]

Re: Need to refresh your math skills? From basic algebra to calculus and beyond.

#15

Post by coffeemug »

I found that the best way for me to internalize a particular subject in hard science is to follow its history by reading the original papers. It's a hard way to do it, but it helps you understand the motivation, the progression of ideas, and the rigor that went into it. Anything else doesn't quite work for me - I feel like I "sort of" understand, but five minutes after I close the textbook (or the YouTube video) the understanding goes away with it.

I watched some of these lectures - they're excellent, but a bit too hand-wavy. Without getting through the rigor there's no hope to gain a complete understanding of the subject matter that stays with you forever.

Re: Need to refresh your math skills? From basic algebra to calculus and beyond.

#16

Post by billswift »

Buying good textbooks to learn from is a lot more cost effective than spending on the high-speed internet connections that is needed to download even a short video in any reasonable time. This "resource" is only useful to already have high-speed internet access.

Re: Need to refresh your math skills? From basic algebra to calculus and beyond.

#18

Post by chaosmachine »

billswift wrote: post #16

Buying good textbooks to learn from is a lot more cost effective than spending on the high-speed internet connections that is needed to download even a short video in any reasonable time. This "resource" is only useful to already have high-speed internet access.

A month of high speed internet is cheaper than a single text book in many countries. Considering there's probably 40 textbooks worth of material on this one page alone, nevermind the rest of the internet, I'd say priorities should be on providing internet access.

Re: Need to refresh your math skills? From basic algebra to calculus and beyond.

#19

Post by oscardelben »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #11
oscardelben wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games. Of course you can never satisfy everyone, but that's not a good reason IMO to not do anything just because a few people might not like it.

> At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games. "People" or "boys" ?? I'd be interested to know your basis for your assertion, and now that the question has been raised I'll start taking informal polls as I go out and give talks. I do about 90 talks a year, and I'll see what the feedback is. And in what aspect of games? Being interested in playing various games is not the same as caring how t…

It probably depends on the age, but in primary school both boys and girls love games. Note that I'm not talking about computer games, although that could be an interesting application.

But my point was not if everyone is interested in games and game programming, but rather that you can't please everybody all the time, and game programming can be just one application, which could be enough to show students there are many applications for what they are learning. If you want to teach other applications, that's perfectly fine, as long as you reach your teaching goal.

Re: Need to refresh your math skills? From basic algebra to calculus and beyond.

#20

Post by elblanco »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #11
oscardelben wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games. Of course you can never satisfy everyone, but that's not a good reason IMO to not do anything just because a few people might not like it.

> At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games. "People" or "boys" ?? I'd be interested to know your basis for your assertion, and now that the question has been raised I'll start taking informal polls as I go out and give talks. I do about 90 talks a year, and I'll see what the feedback is. And in what aspect of games? Being interested in playing various games is not the same as caring how t…

>> At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games.

>"People" or "boys" ??

Depends on the game.

In my experience everyone likes some kind of game. It's the rare person who can't let their hair down at least every once in a while and enjoy some meaningless structured play.

Sure, your wife may not like Super Mario Brothers, but I can almost guarantee that if she took a probability and statistics class or studied combinatorics that coin flipping, dice tossing, dominoes, odds-taking and card playing were major topics of discussion and about the only examples that can be used outside of pure theory that represented a simple enough model of the topic for instructional and study purposes and had as common of a shared experience as possible.

That being said, I never played many card games growing up, and when those topics were discussed I had trouble relating and thought that like your wife it made it hard to relate to. But at least I knew what it was and what the basic concepts were.

Similarly you would be very hard pressed to find anyone younger than about 30 who couldn't relate to some kind of game.

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