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Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

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Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#161

Post by II2II »

locococo wrote: post #145
joshvm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

The trouble is a lot of those practical examples fall into the, "why would I care category". I had a high school physics teacher who described his university antics, one of which included a funny story of a bunch of his friends climbing on top of each other to measure the height of a flag pole. I guess the profs got tired of dealing with students scaling flag poles because I was measuring the height of mountains on the moon at the same university a couple of years later. The thing is nobody really cares about the height of a flag pole, while only a few would care about the height of the mountains on the moon.

The reality is the interesting applications are much more involved. They either require a depth of thought of process or a depth of knowledge that isn't appropriate for a textbook question. Take that trigonometry in games example. The math to do it was in my middle school curriculum, but it becomes obvious that computer graphics is more than trigonometry the moment you try to frame it as an example. I had linear algebra in high school. That will take you pretty far with the mathematics, but it will also be clear that a knowledge of computer programming is involved. Even knowing how to program isn't going to take you all of the way because few are interested in rendering verticies and edges ...

And that is just the obvious progression of knowledge in a simple application. Physics itself involves buckets full of trigonometry in extremely non-obvious ways, non-geometric ways.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#162

Post by recursivecaveat »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #148
CodeMage wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

My beef with the list is what does "a list can be used for a list of steps" explain? Feels like the sort of thing you nod along too and then wake up the next day realizing you didn't learn anything at all.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#163

Post by Aeolun »

CodeMage wrote: post #136
joshvm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% su…

> One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting.

I think the truth is a lot simpler. Most kids won’t use trig in real life.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#165

Post by Aeolun »

ksenzee wrote: post #160
CodeMage wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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% su…

If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.

I’m not going to use force against him. Threatening to take away the computer or tablet is generally plenty. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that a precondition to using these things is ‘go to school’.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#166

Post by melagonster »

Aeolun wrote: post #163
CodeMage wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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% su…

> One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. I think the truth is a lot simpler. Most kids won’t use trig in real life.

Because they can not go to the department that uses trig in university. This is the basic design of society; people want to remind these kids they are not good enough forever.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#167

Post by ponector »

Aeolun wrote: post #163
CodeMage wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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% su…

> One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. I think the truth is a lot simpler. Most kids won’t use trig in real life.

There was a popular joke during my studies in university:

Advanced math came in handy just once in my life. My keys fell in the toilet, and I realized the best tool was a wire bent like an integral.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#168

Post by lacy_tinpot »

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.

Did we all just collectively forgot basic literacy?

You as the reader when you're reading anything are supposed to verify claims the author is making.

You never expect anything to be sources of truth.

That's why every textbooks either cites the sources or proves their work.

Very rarely do you have any textbook that's just a list of facts out of thin air. I don't think I've seen a single textbook, even bad ones, do this. They always cite their claims, or they show the logical steps to prove or justify a claim. Good textbooks make it easy to follow and clearly show their steps for the convenience of their readers.

Any good textbook seriously considers both the historic literature on their subject, presents the context of that literature, and shows some kind of proof of work that synthesizes all of that to support their claim.

This is always the case. This is how basic academic writing is done.

And it is the job of the reader to follow those citations, and to verify the claims. That's literally how our academic system works.

It's basic literacy.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#169

Post by layer8 »

kccqzy wrote: post #133
raincole wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

You have to already have a good understanding of the concept that is meant by “list” here, in order to make sense of that sentence. And even then it might not be clear that the list would be used to represent the recipe.

This does almost nothing to explain what a “list” is in the CS sense. Teaching material needs to show how a list could be used for a recipe, and from that the student might begin to form a first incomplete understanding of what a “list” is.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#170

Post by tremon »

eranation wrote: post #71

I love learning new things, Khan academy got me all the way through college, and I use ChatGPT / Claude to help me study papers regularly. I got frustrated really fast. Here is an example: https://learnyourway.withgoogle.com/scopes/1KNlGW5E/immersiv... It starts with just this sentence, followed by a quiz on that sentence: > When we are born, we inherit our genetic makeup and biological features. However, our identit…

There is no way to answer that question, period. Neither the term "psychology" nor the term "sociology" is defined in the text (and the terms are used in union, not constrasted), so to have any hope of answering at all you need to apply knowledge not found in the text, which is expressly prohibited.

(edit to add:)

This is just regular poor-quality language model output. The language model is trained on data where the phrase "based on the provided text" makes a common appearance between a text segment and subsequent questions, but the model has no knowledge of the very specific, limiting meaning of that phrase: it limits the following question to assess reading comprehension only, not general knowledge.

So no, I don't think this is a minor bug that's easily fixable: a pure language model will always associate key signaling phrases with the wrong type questions, because it has no concept of (didactic) mode. It basically considers all phrases ornamental instead of purposeful.

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