Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests • Hacker News Board

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#51

Post by hef19898 » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:21 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #13

'We walked into an empty room that once was the metal shop. It was perfect. I could imagine it having tools and materials and workbenches. I could imagine groups of curious kids being active, social, and mobile. ' When I was in 6th grade, they let us use a spot welder and press brake. I still have the box I made out of folded sheet metal from that time. We also had to make a little container out of folded sheet metal…

Reminds me of getting at least a small workshop in my house ASAP! Not the welding machines, I risk brning my house down myself, but at least a wood shop. Still remember the fun I had with my grandfather in his work shop (wood and later metal). Every kid should get that oppurtunity!

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#52

Post by larrys » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:21 PM UTC

jellicle wrote: post #19

Sigh. You need both. The reality is that there's a lot of book-learning in the world. You're never going to build a rocket to the moon by starting in your backyard with some sheet metal - your lifespan isn't long enough if you take that approach. You have to read books written by people who have gone before, and learn from their mistakes, which you can do at a far more rapid pace than you can by making all those mist…

"Before I get downvoted into oblivion"

Why is it always necessarily to add this? It's like "I apologize in advance but I'm going to insult you".

As an aside I was wondering this morning if people who down vote read an entire comment or downvote on the first negative thing they don't like, disagree with etc. If that is the case you would think that putting your last sentence (sans the bigdio) would suffice as a prophylactic statement?

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#53

Post by sopooneo » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:24 PM UTC

roc wrote: post #41

jellicle wrote: post #19

Sigh. You need both. The reality is that there's a lot of book-learning in the world. You're never going to build a rocket to the moon by starting in your backyard with some sheet metal - your lifespan isn't long enough if you take that approach. You have to read books written by people who have gone before, and learn from their mistakes, which you can do at a far more rapid pace than you can by making all those mist…

I think it's necessary to draw a distinction between book-learning, standardized tests as a means to test book learning and the absolute focus on standardized tests that followed the NCLB Act. Book learning is indeed essential. But standardized tests are far from a necessary component of that. They just happen to be the cheapest/least-offensive devil-we-know for judging whether a student comprehends a passage. And th…

The emphasis on tests, yes, that is a problem. I agree with you. But of course people see something used poorly and want to get rid of it completely. This happens in many areas, but perhaps nowhere worse than in public education. The trends over the years are a wild backlash from one side to the other over and over, with the system invariably throwing the baby out with the bathwater on each cycle.

Over and over in education debates I see false dichotomies posed without the slightest hesitation, and people passionately argue whether we should do A xor B. But in almost all such debates the correct answer seems to me not to take one side, but to find the proper balance between the two.

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#54

Post by smacktoward » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:25 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #13

'We walked into an empty room that once was the metal shop. It was perfect. I could imagine it having tools and materials and workbenches. I could imagine groups of curious kids being active, social, and mobile. ' When I was in 6th grade, they let us use a spot welder and press brake. I still have the box I made out of folded sheet metal from that time. We also had to make a little container out of folded sheet metal…

Part of this is just a reflection of the changing economy. Shop classes were funded when there was a demand in our economy for people who made things. Now that we've outsourced the making of things to China, there's no perceived need for learning how things are made anymore; they just get made, somewhere out of sight, and when they break we throw them away and buy new ones.

This is a strangely infantile way for a society to live. Part of the mystique grown-ups had to me when I was a kid was that grown-ups were the ones who knew how things worked -- I knew how to break my toys, but only grown-ups knew how to fix them. Growing up was the process of being initiated into these mysteries. That's less true today; now feels more like an age of adults striving to get back to the (blissful?) ignorance of childhood.

Of course, this feeling could just be an artifact of my being an adult now :-D

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#55

Post by blhack » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:27 PM UTC

Don't get this stuff backwards.

Schools don't need to build metalshops and have children go through rote construction of standard pieces. That's the exact same thing as standardized testing, we just like it more because we're hackers.

What we need are more fab labs: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/faq/

and hackerspaces.

What we really need is for my city to give a $1 Million endowment to my local hackerspace so that we can properly redo our electrical infrastructure, buy more tools, and run more classes.

And then we need every other city in the country to find similar programs, and nurture them in the same way.

Every single time a kid walks past our lab and starts oogling our display windows, somebody comes out front and gets them inside for a tour.

If it's me touring, and their parents allow it, every single one of them gets to press the go buttons on our HUGE laser cutter, and gets to take home an example of a time that they built something in a hackerspace using a big scary industrial tool: they make a stencil of their name.

That's HUGE.

AND IT WORKS. Remember that kid that was on the front page of a bunch of things shooting marshmallows with the president? He hangs out in our lab. Another of the kids at our lab gave a talk at Ignite Phoenix (which is just like TEDx) about 3d printers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyZxzkd-Jsk).

These kids are freaking awesome! I wish there were 10 of our labs in Phoenix.

I'm sorry, but the school system is broken. There are a few teachers doing beautiful things, but they're few and far between. In my 12 years in the system, I met one of them.

How many high schools would let me stick around in the shop until 4:00am building? None? How many would give a 12 year old kids' dad a keycard that gets him in 24/7 to use industrial machines, DSOs, SCARY POWER SUPPLIES etc.

Would my high school teacher have been fired if people knew she let me and my friends stay in the computer lab fucking with linux until all hours?

Probably.

Except that fuckery, the thing my teacher probably could have been fired for, was one of the most important experiences of my high school education.

That's...bad.

We don't need to fix the school system. We need a new system entirely.

OH! I wrote an article about exactly this a couple of years ago: http://newslily.com/blogs/104

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#56

Post by hef19898 » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:27 PM UTC

jellicle wrote: post #19

Sigh. You need both. The reality is that there's a lot of book-learning in the world. You're never going to build a rocket to the moon by starting in your backyard with some sheet metal - your lifespan isn't long enough if you take that approach. You have to read books written by people who have gone before, and learn from their mistakes, which you can do at a far more rapid pace than you can by making all those mist…

The two APICS tests I took sofar are really standardized. The only thing they didn't test was actual knowledge and comprehension of the subject and the thing they didn't deliver was realistic results. What they tested was you ability to read the question in the right way. I take these tests since I assume that they are pretty american-style (atleast I was told so). Doesn't mean we don't have them in good old europe, too.

And in my experience, that's all these test do besides being somtetimes completely random. I agree that it is easier to give marks based on these tests,but they don't really tell you want you want to know.

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#57

Post by bluekeybox » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:28 PM UTC

waterlesscloud wrote: post #33

cryptoz wrote: post #4

I remember taking a standardized test in public elementary school in the US (I think this was the Iowa series). At the end of one section I finished early, I counted the number of questions and was planning on finding out some basic stats on the questions. We hear "pencils down", and so the break period comes around. I comply, and the teacher collects our tests. I then picked up my pencil again and started doing a bu…

This is pretty much why you have to have standardized tests. Subpar teachers like this one. You couldn't possibly trust someone like that to make any sort of valid evaluation of her students.

I think you actually have a good point there.

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#58

Post by exDM69 » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:28 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #51

krschultz wrote: post #13

'We walked into an empty room that once was the metal shop. It was perfect. I could imagine it having tools and materials and workbenches. I could imagine groups of curious kids being active, social, and mobile. ' When I was in 6th grade, they let us use a spot welder and press brake. I still have the box I made out of folded sheet metal from that time. We also had to make a little container out of folded sheet metal…

Reminds me of getting at least a small workshop in my house ASAP! Not the welding machines, I risk brning my house down myself, but at least a wood shop. Still remember the fun I had with my grandfather in his work shop (wood and later metal). Every kid should get that oppurtunity!

I live in a small cramped apartment, but I'd really like to do some wood works. So I bought some balsa wood and a few small tools to do some miniature models. It's not like doing real carpentry but will do until I get myself a shack to fit a band saw in.

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#59

Post by smacktoward » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:29 PM UTC

CognitiveLens wrote: post #36

I'm amazed at the short-sightedness apparent in this article and in some of the comments here. Yes, the American public education system is broken and is to a large extent too focused on poorly-constructed standardized testing, but imagining that 1) the system used to be better for students, 2) the resources exist for universal project-based learning/assessment, and 3) project-based learning/assessment would fix many…

In fairness, this is an article from Slate, aka "News For Nervous Upper-Class White People". So it shouldn't shock you that they might not stop to consider how offensive "have the kids build robots!" might be to an educator in a school system that can't even afford to maintain reasonable class sizes, much less a robotics lab.

Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

#60

Post by jellicle » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 3:32 PM UTC

raganwald wrote: post #35

jellicle wrote: post #19

Sigh. You need both. The reality is that there's a lot of book-learning in the world. You're never going to build a rocket to the moon by starting in your backyard with some sheet metal - your lifespan isn't long enough if you take that approach. You have to read books written by people who have gone before, and learn from their mistakes, which you can do at a far more rapid pace than you can by making all those mist…

The writer's complaint is daft. The purpose is to test if you can read a passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes. From my understanding of cognitive science, the question asked is deeply flawed if you want to test comprehension without testing knowledge of microscopes. One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model in your head of what is being described. You then answe…

> One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model

This test question isn't testing that.

> What I’m saying is that answering this question well requires experience with microscopes or similar devices.

It sure doesn't. It requires you to be able to read and comprehend text. That's it. The subject could have been Martian fizzbozzles instead of microscopes.

> Being able to answer the question without prior knowledge of what a microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses period, or refracting telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.

It sure isn't. Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no prior knowledge of the subject.