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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

#221

Post by lelanthran »

a96 wrote: post #212
lelanthran wrote: post #206

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? 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…

And the problem with that answer is that it doesn't lead to engagement or interest and that means it doesn't lead to learning. It's a bad answer. I also disagree that there needs to be justification. I don't think students' minds work like that. What's needed is something different and probably many kinds of something different since there's many kinds of learners. So far, a huge percentage of students are getting le…

> And the problem with that answer is that it doesn't lead to engagement or interest and that means it doesn't lead to learning. It's a bad answer.

With an insufficiently developed brain, there is no answer that leads to engagement or interest.

Sometimes you'll find yourself telling kids "How do you know you won't like it unless you try it?"

If you, personally, claim to have never told a kid that specific sentence (regardless of context), I have serious doubts that you actually have kids.

Sometimes engagement and interest only come after the kid has been forced through a little bit of it.

They are children; you can't always reason with them because they have not yet developed sufficient reasoning skills. Making the claim that reasoning is all you need to get children to do the right thing is plain nonsense.

> I also disagree that there needs to be justification.

Sounds like we're in agreement, after all? I also don't think there needs to be a justification for "You need to learn Maths". This is why I said an answer along the lines of "you'll understand why later" is all you can do when asked for a justification.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#222

Post by bonoboTP »

andai wrote: post #174
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…

I asked my math teacher for applications and she just mumbled something, embarrassed. Took me until a while later to realize that most of my teachers had never stepped foot outside a school in their entire life. Later at university I complained about the lack of applications in the textbook, and my classmates became very upset. One of them responded, "we are mathematicians, we do not concern ourselves with applicatio…

That's a bit of a caricature, but would you ask the same of an English major or an art historian? Math is an intellectual activity that's about sharpening and chiseling the mind, and the satisfaction of figuring things out and seeing things fall into place neatly. Thinking about real things out there in the world in math ways (~= applications) can also be fun.

Just look at software. It's undeniably useful with many applications. Still, some people treat it playfully and in an enjoyable way, they learn about algorithms they won't ever use, just for the elegance, read Knuth, even if reading some React handbook may be more useful for their day-to-day. There are more considerations than "but how will this make my employer richer?"

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#223

Post by bonoboTP »

CodeMage wrote: post #178
Aeolun wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That was pretty much my point. Most kids won't use trig in real life, so making trig more interesting is only half of what we need to do. The other half is making kids more interested in learning.

Or drop the idea that everyone has to be forced to learn the same academically-inclined curriculum. Of course this is a non-starter, because it sounds like "giving up on" some kids.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#224

Post by graemep »

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…

The "trig in real life" is a common question, but its deeply flawed. You can use trig in real life - I used it last time I bought a monitor because I wanted to compare the areas of models with different aspect ratios and I only had the diagonal size and aspect rations.

There are much deeper flaws in this question:

1. That you only learn what you are guaranteed to use in everyday life. Education should leave you with choices. You learn trigonometry so you can later choose to do things that require it.

2. That everything you learn in school has to be something that is likely to be useful. When did you last use history or literature or art?

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#225

Post by bonoboTP »

tremon wrote: post #170
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…

> assess reading comprehension only, not general knowledge.

It looks like an LSAT question. Exactly the opposite of a knowledge question. These reading comprehension questions are designed to test whether you can - without any specific knowledge of the domain area - figure out what a piece of text claims, without injecting your own knowledge or assumptions. It's an ill fit for teaching a subject matter, though can be useful for reading and argumentation (especially in lawyer-like jobs, hence LSAT).

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#226

Post by navigate8310 »

palmotea wrote: post #202
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 con…

There's a difference between lying versus explaining why the reasoning of OP is wrong or right and that they are onto something that they'll learn in future classes. The teacher could just give resources to further pique OP's interest but at the same time explain clearly that they cannot write advanced reasonings in exams. And that they must rote learn the false models at least for exams.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#227

Post by a96 »

ares623 wrote: post #147
squigz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

I always assume textbooks are opinionated and full of errors. I learned that to be true at a very young age. Sometimes that assumption turns out to be mostly wrong, though, and those books are rare treasures. Most schoolbooks in particular are pretty terrible.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#229

Post by watwut »

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…

It is also a fallacy. Interesting and practical are two different things, especially for kids. Kids will happily learn completely useless things and will dislike clearly practical and important subjects.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#230

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

sky2224 wrote: post #130
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Khan academy and brilliant are both excellent. They're hand crafted and limited in subjects and depth, but i think establish the current "roof" in how perfectly structured self-learning materials would look. I've heard from teachers using them in schools and found excellent results. AI rephrasing words better to each individual isn't interesting to me. Automatic Interactive small quizzes, puzzles, and self adjusting…

Here's a conversation using ChatGPT Study Mode I had a little bit ago covering Linear Algebra concepts that I wanted to learn. The concepts that were gone over in this chat aren't the most complicated, but I think you might find it interesting to look over since I think it actually does show we'll likely reach the level you're seeking. This conversation is with 4o shortly before the GPT-5.0 rollout, which is why it's…

That is indeed better than ive seen before. I do still find it does do what i dislike. "Here is the forumla for cosine similarty, try compute it"

Id rather it approach it from "we would like to calculate difference in vector direction. Dot product is almost what we want, but cosine similarty is even better"

The "Angle connection" of cosine similarty was instead of added as an extra note later. But i think its fundamental to its intuition that excluding it from the main explanation could lead to a misunderstanding.

(Heck the definition section of Wikipedia makes the formula very clear, and the introductionsection is also excellent to descibe its utility)

So we may reach is one day. But i still think its a ways off compared to a proper hand crafted learning materials. And this subject specifically is a best case scenario.

(3b1b is amazing if you still want to get a more inutitive grasp on matrix transformatios)

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