351–360 of 392 posts
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> start your own school and show the experts how wrong they are Let parents have vouchers to attend my school and I will.
If your ideas are so effective, why can't you compete you against the many private schools already in existence?
The gap in education is at the bottom, not at the top
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Most (all) people have no counterfactual to compare against. We can compare across cultures, though, and say that more educated ones tend to be more prosperous along nearly every dimension than less educated ones.
Have you compared the salaries of an Eastern European developer with a CS degree to the salary of a self taught developer in the USA? Economic migration is basically the act of declaring your education worthless and declaring the destination to be more important.
It was a surprisingly engageming and effective way to learn CSS Grid and I'm almost certainly going to buy the author's next course on https://mastery.games/
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> I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals What if I told you that (morpheus.jpg) this has been common knowledge in pedagogical research for over half a century now, and that pretty much all attempts of reforming education in the light of that simple fact have failed :(
That sounds very interesting, could you elaborate or provide some links? Aren't there successful 'alternative' school programs?
Look at what the “elites” do to educate their kids. Do they long to put their kids in front of a computer to play video games or do they pay top dollar for tiny teacher:student ratios at great facilities with competent teachers/leadership? I can’t imagine anyone dealing with kids learning from home this lockdown and thinking education should be more technologically driven.
> I can’t imagine anyone dealing with kids learning from home this lockdown and thinking education should be more technologically driven. With the possible exception of the social aspects, lockdown distance learning seems like a waste of time vs. self-directed learning. Which could be as simple as letting kids do things outside and around the house. Or maybe providing bookmobiles and mobile libraries, maybe even a sm…
The biggest failure of education today is that its oriented towards an outcome (tests / uni) that is dubious at best, detrimental at worst
OP is correct to identify dev cost as holding the key to software-based education. Here is why:
Education today is the remnant of the industrial assembly line model. That worked out great...for fridges and cars.
Children are not fridges. Children are not cars.
This education where 1-size-fits all produces the worst outcomes. It holds back brilliant students and leaves the challenging cases behind.
Software will solve all that due to (eventual) low cost customization.
In order for this to work, many planets have to align. In particular, some idealists have to let go of the model where all students should learn x topic. The entire curricula must be on the table
In other words, society must come to accept that 1) learning will not be uniform ie some students will get more out of school than others and 2) students will pass on topics we take for granted. Biology , civics, algebra etc....all gone, provided that students can explore AND dive deep into an alternative topics they care about, whether that is mechanics, geology, philosophy etc.
In short. Kids today are going to school memorizing some info, yet learning nothing. Thet should instead be able come out masters of topics they are interested in, if indeed that's all they care about.
This would be prohibitively expensive to do with teachers as it would require a 1:1 ratio.
Software can guide that journey.
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Algeria, Tunisia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Mexico, Argentina and Indonesia all have a greater proportion of the populace in third level education than France did in 1970. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-enrollment-ratio-in...
I can see now where you are getting your idea but that's a quantitative measure only which does not consider quality of education. The reason that 1970s Europe was better educated than Brazil or Latin America today is because of the substandard education so many will get from public secondary school and that's where their education stops. Enrollment ratio in university also doesn't say much about graduation rates. Wh…
I made no such claim. I said that education was a consequence of economic growth, not vice versa. That is all. If you do a regression of changes in education over time versus changes in economic growth there is no trend. Changes in education do not cause changes in economic growth.
That Brazil is not competing with 1970s France is irrelevant to my claim. Education is a consequence rather than a cause of growth.
I own a educational game company. Long story short: it doesn't sell. At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games. 1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play. 2. Sell them to th…
We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don't want to play "educational" games. They just want to play fun games. And, let's be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft. Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space P…
Only if you try to do it very naively. Most of the time, these "games" are "lets put blinky lights around match equations."
That's definitely not how you turn math and science into games. You turn them into games by making engineering games.
There was a really great paper I ran into a decade ago that looked at the theory making by players of World of Warcraft. Players were coming up with complex mathematical models for how to play the game most efficiently. THAT is how you make math a game.
The goal of the game shouldn't be "let's solve these math problems."
The goal of the game should be anything but that, and then you setup the game so that the best way to reach that goal is to use math.
Science opens the door even further, because hypothesis and experimentation is a fundamental part of playing games.
There was a recent post on here regarding the best ways to learn electricity. One of the top replies was to use some minecraft mod. I don't know anything about that mod, but that fact that it was one of the recommendations really said a lot to me.
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Indeed, wonder how the McLean would land now almost 30 years later? If they sold it as a healthy choice today, would it face a similar failure? Speaking of choice and marketing, wonder why McDonald’s in the US still lacks a veggie burger. Is it based on a business decision?
It absolutely must be, because they have even vegan options here and there. Sweden, for instance, has had vegan burgers for several years (first McBean and now McVegan). I know other countries have something similar. It seems to me that US McDonald's must be scared of diluting their brand by also going after the veggie crowd. Perhaps due to McLean failing or that they just bide their time until they can make a whole…
Would be fascinating if they did something like that. Pret a Manger did this recently by adding stores called Veggie Pret. Might be tough for McDonald’s to pull that off, though, since they also cater a lot to kids. By introducing two stores, veggie vs non-veggie, wonder if that would create signaling issues of healthiness with audiences?
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You have a lot of laments about "media connections" to let people know about your business. I think you're looking at this wrong. It's not about "connections." It's about doing business the old-fashioned way: advertising, and hiring a public relations agency. Advertising is self-explanatory. But for some reason a lot of tech companies don't hire PR firms. They like to cheap out and do PR in-house, or they simply neve…
> It's the PR firm's job to have the "media connections" you so desperately crave. Any meaningful connection is going to be too expensive for someone like GP, I am afraid. > Tech people are notoriously bad at public relations Please avoid (false) generalizations.
This is a false generalization. You don't have to choose a big-name New York PR agency. There are thousands of other shops that are quite affordable. Some are just one or two people, and can be surprisingly effective if you pick the right one.
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The last thing anyone needs is to hire one who thinks it's a really neato idea to buy a few weeks' worth of pop-unders on the OANN website. You have a fundamental misunderstanding about what a PR company does. You're thinking about an advertising agency. They're not the same thing.
Rather than dunking on someone who's already admitted they don't know how to hire a good PR agency, how about answering the question?
It's like asking someone on HN "Tell me how to hire a good person." I can't hand-hold someone through the internet.