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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

#201

Post by amluto »

Terr_ wrote: post #197
amluto wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point in general, but I do find myself actually using trigonometry for fairly basic real-world purposes more often than one might expect. For example: how big of a piece of material fits in a particular position if it’s not parallel or perpendicular to the stuff around it? If a rope supports a load in the middle, how much tension does the rope need? How much of an angle should be cut into a door to…

> If a rope supports a load Rambling off-topic, but I remember being very impressed at how a uniform hanging rope makes a catenary [0] shape which is related to making strong structural arches. So maybe if the students were somewhere where the class could design and make an igloo... :p [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary

Fun exercise for the reader: if you have that uniform hanging rope support a uniform flat suspension bridge (via a bunch of closely spaced vertical ropes), and the bridge is much, much heavier than the ropes, then you get a parabola instead of a catenary. Wikipedia gives a derivation involving differential equations, but it glosses over the actual fundamental difference between these situations. But you can explain what’s going on with just trigonometry and no calculus, let alone differential equations: consider how much weight a small section of chain that isn’t right in the middle is supporting. You’ll end up with a drawing involving a right triangle and some numbers associated with the sides, and those numbers will line up differently with the opposite, adjacent and hypotenuses in the two cases.

So your off-topic rambling isn’t off-topic at all :)

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#202

Post by palmotea »

amarant wrote: post #190

This seems like it has some pretty great potential. Human teachers don't have infinite patience. I recall my high school chemistry teacher's response when I was trying to understand why certain reactions happened: "just accept that these reactions happens and memorise them for the test. Don't try to understand it" I did not become a chemist. Now I'm in my thirties and I kinda wish I had studied something involving ch…

> I recall my high school chemistry teacher's response when I was trying to understand why certain reactions happened: "just accept that these reactions happens and memorise them for the test. Don't try to understand it"

> I did not become a chemist.

That kinda sounds like you got tripped up by the lie-to-children phase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children), demanding an explanation requiring advanced concepts before you've mastered the basic ones.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#203

Post by palmotea »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #76
bigfishrunning wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the problem is, you don't understand the passage, so therefore how will you vet the answers? Seems like hallucinations would be very very damaging in this use-case

I think your mileage will vary by subject and level. If you’re a complete novice reading a niche graduate level textbook on Tolstoy’s critique of the Russian war effort in War and Peace, you’re going to get some wild hallucinations, and you’ll have no idea how to determine fact from fiction. If you’re reading a high school textbook about the history of pre-revolution Russia, the models will have pretty comprehensive…

> If you’re reading a high school textbook about the history of pre-revolution Russia, the models will have pretty comprehensive coverage of every concept you’re likely to come across.

Even in that case, it can still get its wires crossed, creating connections between those concepts that aren't true.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#204

Post by hansmayer »

Between this bunch of nothing and Github announcing forcibly removing $0 overage budgets from Copilot accounts for premium request... this whole "AI" bunch seems really desperate to drive adoption of their expensive toy technology. I wonder why is PG not calling out his famous "Solution in search of a problem" yet :)

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#205

Post by lovehashbrowns »

amluto wrote: post #188
II2II wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I agree with your point in general, but I do find myself actually using trigonometry for fairly basic real-world purposes more often than one might expect. For example: how big of a piece of material fits in a particular position if it’s not parallel or perpendicular to the stuff around it? If a rope supports a load in the middle, how much tension does the rope need? How much of an angle should be cut into a door to…

I think for me personally although I don’t use maths often enough in any practical sense, the one thing I think has stopped me progressing in life how I feel I want to has been my lack of maths knowledge. I don’t mean in a career sense but in an enjoyment sense. I watched a video about proving that the square root of two is irrational and that made me irrationally happy, and I’d love to keep going but a lot of the maths in other proofs or concepts gets absolutely insane. I don’t know how to express that to kids learning maths for the first time, though. It also almost feels like the world of math is so vast there’s something for everyone to enjoy casually. That feels like a video game analogy to me with all the different genres built around basic fundamental concepts.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#206

Post by lelanthran »

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.

> 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?

Agreed.

> 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.

Disagree. The justification for why they should learn $FOO may never be understood by a mind that we are teaching $FOO to.

There's good justification for learning to read, but not one that would be understood by a 6 year old.

There's similarly good justification for teaching Maths, but you'd be hard pressed to convince a 16 year old of the value in practicing abstract reasoning, using Maths as the vehicle.

Sometimes, the only good answer to give a kid is "you'll see the value when you're older".

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#207

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> I see no problem with the examples being boring.

I'm in agreement with this point; the examples are boring, but that's not really relevant. After all, we're mostly talking about Maths ITT, not history or social sciences.

1. Some foundational study is needed before you get to the really interesting problems at a higher grade/level/school/university.

2. Who cares if they are boring? A spectacular facility to learn Maths which is demonstrated by high marks indicates better abstract reasoning skills, making it easier for specific trades to decide who is more suitable.

3. How will the kids know whether they like Maths or not if they skip trig in high school?

(Sidenote: Am I the only one who finds trig easy and everything else in Maths hard?)

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#208

Post by vnorilo »

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…

When I was in third grade, I decided I want to make computer games to get more of them. Dad got me started with GW-Basic turtle graphics and I made pictures with them - usually non-functional title screens for my games.

At some point I had made a small space ship and was able to make it turn around with the wonderful angle command [1]. However, I could not figure out how to make it move "forward" regardless of the angle.

I was also attending an after hours computer graphics club, mostly about Deluxe Paint, taught by a 20-something student (who much later went on to found a GPU company and got acquihired by ATI/AMD). He would help me occasionally, and in this case he took a tiny slip of paper and wrote down a couple of lines about sin and cos. No questions, no explanations, no gatekeeping.

Just like that I internalized this foundational piece of trig - later when it arrived in school maths it was easy and obvious for me. I had a practical application, but even more I think was because it started as a need I had, and when given to me, felt like a gift and an enabler.

Still much later I studied Seymour Papert's pedagogy and understood I had lived it. I consider myself fortunate.

1: http://www.antonis.de/qbebooks/gwbasman/draw.html

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#209

Post by lelanthran »

cjs_ac wrote: post #10

I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation. The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that under…

> The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject.

Why would that cause you to leave teaching physics? Was he also the head of the science subjects? Did you report to him in any way?

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#210

Post by vkazanov »

lelanthran wrote: post #206
ksenzee wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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? Agreed. > 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. Disagree. The justification for why they should…

As parents do, I had numerous discussions with my kid about math and additional languages. Here's my usual explanation: it's existing knowledge that opens doors, not theoretical one, and you want to have as many doors open as possible.

Well, I use other words bit that's my message anyway :-)

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