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

141–150 of 244 posts

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#141

Post by ztravis »

The "personalized" basketball example isn't a good one - your hand pushing the ball down and the floor pushing it back up aren't an action/reaction pair. You could, for example, push the ball down over a bottomless pit (or in space or whatever) so that you have one without the other. Nitpicky, yes, and it also seems plausible that this very example would be found in textbooks already, but I wouldn't like to use it.

Nor do I understand why you'd say "ouch, that hurt" while dribbling...

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#142

Post by sonicvroom »

j45 wrote: post #74
sonicvroom wrote: post #72

> The personalization pipeline All of this hurts. GenAI cannot replace people grounded in reality. Especially not teachers and mentors. The effects will be nauseating to anyone who cherishes the development of human beings and minds in general. Teaching and mentoring is a two-sided thing. The mentor, if adequately tutored or capable himself, learns more than the student. I understand that this is something "we" hope…

Personalized learning pre-LLMs has been a lot of hand waving and not really supporting instructors or instructional evolution.

it's brutal!!!!

we could blame universities... but nobody forced their hand and they adapted to lower standards because ... [no peace of mind to take the time, ok, economists x'] ...

I can supply a personal narrative, though: ( I have to exclude the conspiratorial part )

I move back home when my little sister had issues in 8th grade. it was coincidental. I started tutoring her.

(background: After I turned 13, every spring, summer and fall, I WORKED at a Gaertnerei aka garden center until I finished my Abitur with a C)

She made progress. ( she's a bad example because someone fucked with her thyriod right when she started to make progress ( it's Germany, they are D.U.M.B with eugenics, they outsourced it to The USA because they are bad losers but whatever ))

She made progress. What did I learn? A LOT. Zero hand waving. In retro, I learned the MINIMUM ( I, do you understand who I felt like back then and NOW ? ) ( for clarity, I THINK I know where your comment comes from ) ... HOW can they fail to teach this to youngsters in University? Wait ... I get it. The system works well to reach it's objective, but CAN it be aware of what lies ahead? No way. I was 15, or 16, now 37, when I was planting some dumb trees in some dumb pot, when I realized, in my ADHD obliviousness, that neither my boss, nor his son, my age, my then colleague, knew how things would turn out. Working class, programmed* to be this way, ok.

Fast forward: my classmates, the Jahrgang before and after, all teachers for more or less ten years now. ... ... ... None founded their own school, despite abilities to get the finances, ... ... ... all abiding to the standard curriculum ... ... ... none of them being a Studienrat ( some higher regional rank ) ... ... all feeling very cool cuz they make 5k a month (if) ... ... ... ... ... .PERIOD, moving on:

THEY wouldn't think of

> supporting instructors or instructional evolution.

HOW THE FUCK WOULD/COULD COMPUTER SCIENTISTS, OR ENGINEERS THINK THE SAME?

GERMANY: (our region lacks E V E R Y T H I N G ... agricultural corporations with something worthwhile developing ... I had someone uniquely capable (and experienced in my Jahrgang) but ... ... ... nothing ... not even a 0.1%er now or soon to be ... so even if you judge form a punched drug dealer's aka Fortune 500 POV... N O T H I N G.... HOW, except portfolio capitalism featuring "please don't make my child understand how disrespectful my capabilities are to the evolution of my grandparents genes" ... )

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#143

Post by duskwuff »

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…

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

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#144

Post by SJMG »

cjs_ac wrote: post #66
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…

> I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference. Where have you taught? I taught in Australia and the United Kingdom, where many of these things were mandated by the promulgation of spiral curricula by the relevant government departments. I'm aware in the US that, for example, algebra is taught as…

Right, that specific claim should be understood with US high schools and higher education in mind. There the massed approach rules the day.

Since these things I mentioned are well demonstrated to be effective and you don't think there's anything left to be had with a subject-agnostic approach, I infer you have a high opinion of how well these countries have implemented these "tactics". Is that right?

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#145

Post by locococo »

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…

All the text books I've ever seen had practical examples in them. Like determining the height of a tree or a house simply based on trigonometry.

Your suggestion is interesting but I am not convinced that a student would be helped by aligning the examples with their interests. I could see a student asking how trig relates to computer games and the example the LLM generates becoming much more involved.

I see no problem with the examples being boring. The people that developed these techniques had such fundamental problems to solve and the wonder to me is the human mind that came up with these methods.

All this to say, maybe we lack appreciation for the fundamental sciences that underpin every aspect of our modern lives.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#146

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

janalsncm wrote: post #111
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going by the atrocious salary expectation for teaching (which i firmly place as one of, if not the most, fundamentally important jobs in modern society) i think we've already established where we land on this. And note how i didn't mention a country; i think this is a widespread issue beyond country borders currently.

My only other frame of reference is China where being a teacher is a very respectable and competitive job with good wages. (Software engineering is way less prestigious interestingly.) They even have a national holiday for teachers. So it would be essentially unthinkable for a tech company to drop a demo that threatens teachers.

> teacher is a very respectable and competitive job with good wages

My frame of reference is europe and America. I suspect more of asia than just china mirrors that respect, as education feels nearly unhealthily emphasised.

The so called advanced world that prosper on innovation, design and R&D is skimpimg on the very thing that is supposed to be our advantage. Its frustrating.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#147

Post by ares623 »

squigz wrote: post #119
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All knowledge is open ended... I bet when you're learning a new subject you do the same exact thing.

When learning from a source like a textbook, docs, or being instructed by a person, I do not expect the source of truth to lie to me, and verify everything they tell me.

This. When you're reading a reputable textbook, you're not thinking all the time "wait is this true?". You trust the author to be correct and truthful.

Imagine being handed a textbook with a warning in the first page "10% of the facts here are made up (including this one). Good luck!"

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#148

Post by iLoveOncall »

CodeMage wrote: post #139
iLoveOncall wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#149

Post by miki123211 »

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…

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.

Post reply on HN