Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

research.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 244 posts

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#131

Post by raincole »

Imnimo wrote: post #14

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" May…

> "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.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#132

Post by 3abiton »

anonfunction wrote: post #5

Shameless plug but I made a similar tool called asXiv[1] which allows you to "ask" arXiv.org papers questions. It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper. The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env…

How is that different than generic RAG though? Genuinely curious

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#133

Post by kccqzy »

raincole wrote: post #131
Imnimo wrote: post #14

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" May…

> "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.

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.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#135

Post by SgtBastard »

mattlutze wrote: post #59
Mtinie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s both. Technology is a component (I’d we wouldn’t have books, recorded videos, multimedia aids, etc.).

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.

Nitpick: Language is technology, it’s not something we’re genetically born with and is critical for education to happen.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#136

Post by CodeMage »

joshvm wrote: post #56
Imnimo wrote: post #14

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" May…

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 ar…

"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.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#137

Post by SJMG »

apsurd wrote: post #90
SJMG wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Tell me this wasn't foreign languages? :face_palm: Okay, I was totally with you until this, > but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not…

You may not be wrong that tactics aren't sufficiently widespread, but that's the thing they're just tactics. Spaced-repetition is a good example. It's so objectively better than other forms of memorization, but it's just one tactic for learning. In this sense "teaching well requires a specific set of tools and tactics" is exactly how "a good teacher can teach anything" would make sense. The problem is it doesn't make…

Yeah there seems to be some confusion. I agreed with the comment I replied to in the sense that teaching well requires specific domain knowledge and some specific pedagogy. Where I disagree is the assertion that the "tactics", to use your term, have been perfused through the system and there's nothing left to gain here.

He specifically says, "I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement"

So we all agree that subjects would benefit from specific interventions. The difference is he's going further and saying this is the only way forward; there are no general gains left to be had.

From the strength of the claim alone, this is hard to believe. Where do you stand on this?

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#139

Post by CodeMage »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #126
Imnimo wrote: post #14

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" May…

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.

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.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#140

Post by ycombigators »

layman51 wrote: post #78
ycombigators wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have asked the head of languages to teach you tensor calculus.

I don’t have a firm opinion one way or another about that idea that a “great teacher can teach any subject” but it does bring to my mind the other idea that teachers are increasingly becoming “learning coaches” who aren’t only transferring knowledge into the students, but who are rather encouraging them to develop self-awareness about their own learning.

That concept of teaching seems like a nice idea in a private school setting but wildly incompatible with most schools in the Anglosphere.
Post reply on HN