Khan Academy has poked a hole in my heart that needs to be filled: A computer science curriculum
Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
61–70 of 71 posts
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#62I have not RTFA but equating content delivery with education seems risky. Yes, Khan Academy videos are engaging and often better than getting content from books, but education is much more than content. Education is also about building, creating, interacting, sharing.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
"do you need to learn how the engine of a car works before you can drive it?" No, but you'd be a much better driver if you did. Understanding the basics of a science, especially math, is extremely important to fully grasp the higher level topics. I don't believe one can conceptually understand a topic without understanding the fundamentals that it builds upon. Unfortunately I see philosophies as you describe in my lo…
> No, but you'd be a much better driver if you did [learn how a car engine works] Yes, but one simple computer animation could give you the same understanding of the engine as if you had built the engine yourself. Computers can give you an understanding of calculations in addition to doing the work. > I don't believe one can conceptually understand a topic without understanding the fundamentals that it builds upon. T…
> The very rudimentary basics will need to be learned by calculating, but anything above the fundamentals can be understood without the calculations.
Generally, I agree with this. But if everybody were to adopt that philosophy, eventually we'd get to the point where nobody could actually implement the calculations for those high level concepts. And then what happens when you need to update the software that's been doing all of that for you?
Does everybody need to know how to calculate? Probably not, above arithmetic and some basic algebra. But a lot of people do, and that needs to be included in their education somewhere.
You're probably aware of all that, but I felt it warrants making explicit.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, but you'd be a much better driver if you did [learn how a car engine works] Yes, but one simple computer animation could give you the same understanding of the engine as if you had built the engine yourself. Computers can give you an understanding of calculations in addition to doing the work. > I don't believe one can conceptually understand a topic without understanding the fundamentals that it builds upon. T…
> The very rudimentary basics will need to be learned by calculating, but anything above the fundamentals can be understood without the calculations. Generally, I agree with this. But if everybody were to adopt that philosophy, eventually we'd get to the point where nobody could actually implement the calculations for those high level concepts. And then what happens when you need to update the software that's been do…
I am aware of this, but still, thank you for bringing it up as it is an important issue. The software engineers and people who have to interact with more calculations than everyone else would at sometime need to learn them - as you said.
I think speleding is onto something, though: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2213985
We all believe that calculations need to be taught first, but maybe it is not necessary. Learning the calculations after the bigger concepts has its own advantages. Everyone could start with general education, and those that need it could be taught the more advanced (or one might say, basic) calculations.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#65The Future of Education is going to be game oriented, getting kids to watch boring videos will be very hard.
I strongly suspect you didn't watch the youtube video in the article... Game mechanics are one of the KA's system's biggest features.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my goals with this curriculum is to make teaching mathematic more efficient. This does not necessarily mean teaching a bare minimum. Rather, students should be taught a great amount more at a younger age. In fact, I think mathematics is probably one of the most essential subjects out there. Unfortunately, the way it is taught now is inefficient and gives it a bad name. The rudimentary basics are important for…
By the time an ambitious student finishes high school, they will have learned some manipulations in linear algebra and calculus by rote but they won't have any real understanding. If they enter college and study some further mathematics, the first task of their professors will be to undo the damage. We don't need to teach more, we need to teach better. We should not chase nominal accomplishments such as whether stude…
"The problem all comes down to 10% curriculum and 90% teachers. Curriculum only seriously concerns me when it overconstrains good teachers and prevents them from doing their job."
I agree with this in part but the problem is that relying on good teachers is not something that can be scaled across countries. I'm not sure if the introduction of computers in the national education might help solve this problem, but I'm hopeful.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#67I haven't exactly been as amazed by the Khan Academy as everyone else has. After watching a few videos, I decided that we need to focus more on the material that we are teaching - rather than the methods we go about doing it. They will obviously go hand by hand, but in my opinion the material that we are teaching is our biggest weakness and therefore needs the most reform. A video that everyone should take the time t…
Computer-use should not replace the nitty-gritty mechanics; it should change the way students learn the nitty-gritty mechanics.
Instead of a homework assignment like this: 1. compute this integral. 2. compute this integral. 3. compute this integral. 4. compute this integral. 5. compute this integral.
Students should be getting homework assignments like this: 1. compute this integral. 2. write a procedure to compute any integral.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#68I haven't exactly been as amazed by the Khan Academy as everyone else has. After watching a few videos, I decided that we need to focus more on the material that we are teaching - rather than the methods we go about doing it. They will obviously go hand by hand, but in my opinion the material that we are teaching is our biggest weakness and therefore needs the most reform. A video that everyone should take the time t…
One reason educational material is poor is that it's inevitably written by someone who finds it hard to imagine what it's like not to understand it.
This is why all such material should come with commentaries by thoughtful students which explain it in different ways and link to additional resources. And with commentaries on the commentaries, etc. (We all have different misconceptions.)
There also needs to be a mechanism for rapidly correcting errors. Not every few years but every few days. (Text books are full of errors.)
All of which suggests that we need more educational material which is online, open source and wikified.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were going to major in math, then you may need to go back and learn all the basic calculations in order to build on them. But for anyone else (even scientists), the solution I mentioned above should be enough. Your example of e^x is not closely enough tied to a real world application; therefore it's hard for me to work with it.
> If you were going to major in math, then you may need to go back and learn all the basic calculations in order to build on them. The way it actually happens is that once you start majoring in mathematics, you will rarely see any computations. It's entirely possible to take a linear algebra course for mathematicians without ever row-reducing a non-trivial matrix by hand. Back to teaching kids. If you take a construc…
>You come across patterns like that by doing the tedious work the hard way and looking for short-cuts.
This doesn't work for me. After a little bit of tedium my mind quickly switches through "just fight your way through this" and no more insight will be gained. All the math shortcuts I know I either read about or discovered while playing with numbers on my own time without any homework deadlines.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you were going to major in math, then you may need to go back and learn all the basic calculations in order to build on them. The way it actually happens is that once you start majoring in mathematics, you will rarely see any computations. It's entirely possible to take a linear algebra course for mathematicians without ever row-reducing a non-trivial matrix by hand. Back to teaching kids. If you take a construc…
>You come across patterns like that by doing the tedious work the hard way and looking for short-cuts. This doesn't work for me. After a little bit of tedium my mind quickly switches through "just fight your way through this" and no more insight will be gained. All the math shortcuts I know I either read about or discovered while playing with numbers on my own time without any homework deadlines.
Yes, an important point is that everyone learns differently. Aimless computation is the furthest thing from my mind, and I agree that most people wouldn't notice these patterns if left to their own devices. Computation as an accessory to constructivist learning guided by teachers is what I'm suggesting must be part of a solution.
I'm skeptical of curriculum reform that seeks to excise an important source of learning for a sizeable subset of students.