Check out just about any large textbook company now. They are doing something similar (Carnegie Learning: Mathia). That said, I think Mathigon has a more user friendly, open, and engaging approach that I'd like to see take off.
Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
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Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#12It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching. A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. If advertising networks have ef…
It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'.
Feels to me like we're about as close to that as we are close to regrowing limbs. We've made baby steps.
For one thing, the illustrated primer created content from scratch -- content especially suited to the reader. Mathigon and things like it can only present you with content pre-created by humans.
Secondly, the illustrated primer had an expert understanding of human development, human psychology, and human biology. It used this understanding, along with incredible sensor technology, dynamically to create complex pedagogical plans and follow them by presenting exactly the content the reader needs at the time. At the moment we have only extremely rudimentary planning capabilities (if any), extremely rudimentary sensor/input capabilities (basically limited to what to user types in), and extremely rudimentary algorithms capable of only low order logic (if the user does x they probably want why) with almost no understanding of human psychology.
Not to say we're not making great strides. We're just a really long way off.
Edit: thirdly, The illustrated primer had an expert understanding of every topic it taught Nell. I think we're a long way off from any computer system that has an expert understanding of anything. Our computers can do calculus a lot faster than we can, but they don't understand it at a higher order level.
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. That'd be extremely useful to have.
I concur. While I appreciate that math education at the elementary and high school level is easier to author and has more data points, where I think this approach would really shine is at the college level. The main problem in math is that the higher level you reach, the fewer experts who exist or are willing to sit down 1:1 and tutor students. I think an automated teaching system for analysis, writing proofs, number…
IMO most college level math isn't difficult
Don't make the mistake of assuming the entire world is like you. Plenty of people struggle with lower level math. What makes you think the concepts are not difficult for them, and to blame only the teaching?
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#14I detected a pattern in an arithmetic sequence I was working on (we were adding six each time), so I went from 28 to 28+6. Apparently that was incorrect. When I protested that it was definitely another way of writing 34, the animated tutor then linked me to a video of a man suggesting that I always bubble C on multiple choice exams or something. When I noted that that wasn't really a response to my question, it linked me a youtube video about Einstein.
Kafka would be proud. Heaven forfend actual students encounter such teachers who don't know how addition works!
Another kafkaesque move: On the traveling salesman problem, I can choose 2 for the number of cities the truck must visit, making the complete graph bipartite. When I fill in the blank that the graph is thus bipartite, I'm told that's not quite right. The fundamental (unfixable?) problem here is that the software doesn't really understand graph theory. It's just a series of syntactic prompts to guess what the software is thinking. That's no way to teach.
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#15It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching. A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. If advertising networks have ef…
As a nerdy programmer and human computer interaction researcher, the fact that we are getting incredibly close to having all of the bits required (multitouch, extremely high pixel density screens, batteries/processors that merely add millimeters of thickness to it, recent advances in neural networks, fast enough wireless connectivity to stream high resolution interactive content, etc.) to build this technology is extremely exciting.
As someone who has been doing their best over the past ~10 years to understand how technology has interfaced with societies, cultures, political & business interests, etc. over human history - and all the ways that it has gone wrong - the first thing that I can think of is: who will make this "Young Lady's Primer", and what are their incentives for making it?
A Young Lady's Primer built by the Chinese Communist Party, or Facebook, or American evangelical Christians would be an extremely scary thing.
How can we nerd out on building the former while actively working against the latter?
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#16"Edutainment" sucks donkey balls.
One of the things I'm forever resentful for is the way my life was ruined by not learning things in a structured and rigorous way in childhood. Re-learning (and learning to learn) in adulthood is a pain and is never quite as good as doing it right the first time around.
Thankfully, my own kids are spared of this horror.
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#17I love the chapter on fibonacci numbers. So colourful!
https://mathigon.org/course/sequences/fibonacci
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#18It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching. A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. If advertising networks have ef…
> something that learns your interests
It's not rocket science, a mole rat could figure out that kids want to play video games and eat candy all day long.
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#19It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching. A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. If advertising networks have ef…
> something that learns your interests It's not rocket science, a mole rat could figure out that kids want to play video games and eat candy all day long.
Textbooks aren’t just for children. (Adult education is woefully underoptimized.)
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#20"Edutainment" sucks donkey balls. One of the things I'm forever resentful for is the way my life was ruined by not learning things in a structured and rigorous way in childhood. Re-learning (and learning to learn) in adulthood is a pain and is never quite as good as doing it right the first time around. Thankfully, my own kids are spared of this horror.
Out of curiosity, which topics would you have liked to be taught in a more structured way?