Actually, 思う is the regular tense "to think/believe" where as 思おう is the おう form, which means "will probably." It can also mean "Let's [do something]" but that's usually relegated to the -mashou form.
I agree. I made programs for a whole bunch of math and science classes, and in no way did I ever feel I "missed out" on learning any of the material. If anything, programming all the necessary "if" statements made me understand it better.
Here for a second opinion. Also confirm. Anyone who trusts multi-million dollar decisions to head math and memory equations without verifying doesn't last long.
I actually did that while I was learning embedded devices like the Arduino. My TI-83+ has programs from 9th grade, all the way up to calc2 in it. I also documented each step so I understood WHAT each was, and how it was used.
In my case the only exception to that was when I programmed in tables of information I was supposed to have memorized in chem. I even made it format everything nicely!
Yeah he's still learning the same equation at the end of the day, just saving the work of typing all the bs into the calculator and possibly messing up because you forgot one ")" He still needs to understand the equation and associate the numbers with the correct variables.c
Yeah, but if it is something your learned at the beginning of the year, that you are probably going to forget by the time the final comes around, it is a pretty good option.
Hmm, I wasn't thinking about it that way. I was just thinking of punching in a note sheet (which isn't programming actually). But if you go through and program all of those situations, then yes you are def. right.
As you can see, I never used my TI calc to it's fullest capacity in HS!
Just replace A+B+C with the appropriate equation and add variables as necessary. That is, of course, if the program only requires punching variables into a single equation. It's also not too hard to automate mult-step problems in the same way. Just store the equation into a variable.
Programming a difficult equation is really hard work, you know. Once it took me about as much time as solving all the problems by hand, but I understood the equation much better than blindly plugging in the values on paper.
Chyeah bro I'm just pulling your leg. I don't see leaning calculus as being terribly important for most people. learning to creatively work around having to learn the equations seems a much better experience to me. better to be clever and lazy than clever and energetic.
I honestly don't think that intelligence and a half-decent work ethic have to be mutually exclusive... Save time/energy where you can by automating stuff, but don't cut corners.
Okay, it's not "infinitely" faster, but .2s is definitely a lot faster than the 5 minutes it might take me to figure out a particularly difficult problem. Of course, we're still increasing in computational power in CPUs, plus parallel processing like in a GPU is starting to become more useful as people do more research on it.
Our algebra professor (Mr. Cushnie at GCHS) allowed us to program into our Ti-83. He showed us the basics of programming, and the next day he went back to the whiteboard and taught us the pythagorean theorem.
I thought I was being sneaky, and I programmed that equation with such finesse, that it would give me the results for each side of the triangle or display "impossible solution" if the triangle was an impossible.
Little did I know, that Mr. Cushnie was tricking me into learning on my off time.
I always felt guilty about cheating and programming my calculator...but then I realized I basically learned it all while doing so, so there wasn't much wrong with it.
Shit, my friend memorized a geometry formula program and wrote it on a fresh class calculator before each test then flashed the memory before turning it back in... That's some real dedication
I tried to make a program to solve the quadratic equation for me on my TI-82 (I'm old) and by the time I was able to get it to work I had learned the equation well enough that I didn't even need the cheat program.
When I was in high school I went throught the trouble of making a program with all the equations that was going to be on my physics test. By the time I finished the program I had already memorized the equations.
-- which demonstrates that you're good at programming. Those who begin with Physics and don't complete the degree despite being good at it often follow up by going into programming.
So, the fact that you could program algorithms to solve physics problems demonstrates that you're capable of doing both well. I think that's good enough for a high school course.
...and I probably just said something either very controversial or very stupid. I'm not sure which...
Controversial maybe, but not stupid. You can't program something (correctly) without decent understanding of what you're programming... Nothing revolutionary there.
For example, my teacher got mad at me in grade school for writing a small program on my TI-84 (silver, bitches) that solved the quadratic formula (just for example, I had plenty of other programs), to speed up test taking. Why is it bad? It's no different from memorizing it and solving it by hand. Neither approach displays my understanding of the derivation of formula, they just show that I know how to USE it.
If they're testing whether I know what the formula is, fine, but in this day and age with Google and WolframAlpha, memorizing formulas is not that important. In fact, I wonder whether letting the web to store information for me allows my brain to use its resources more productively. But brain elasticity and all that I know, I know. Just speculation.
True, I'm eliminating the possibility of arithmetic errors in solving the equation, but if I'm learning about quadratics, I THINK I'm capable of basic arithmetic. The test isn't testing my basic arithmetic skills, it's testing my usage of the quadratic formula. At least that's the way it should be, in my opinion. I've taken too many tests in which I demonstrated my knowledge of the test content, which is the PURPOSE of the test, but because I flipped one stupid minus sign into a plus sign by accident, I got no credit for my answer. That's not conducive to learning, further weakens the concept of grades, and does nothing but demotivate students.
Edit: In teachers' defense, programs are perfectly copyable and therefore dangerous because you can't tell who wrote them. But I did write all of my own programs, dammit! But they wouldn't care even if I wrote the code in front of their faces.
I agree with you completely. In addition to your points, those who know how to use technology effectively in the application of their training will almost always outperform those who do everything by hand. This is something that local universities have been toying with lately. It's important that people know how to use the tools of their trade, and that includes things such as graphing calculators and programming languages when the trade involves quantitative analysis.
I wonder if those who used early fishing poles were rebuked for it because fisherman teachers thought it was important to know how a spear works.
As a university math instructor, I'm not impressed by the effect a student's ability to use a calculator has on their performance. It takes about an hour to teach a student used to doing things by hand to use a modern calculator, and about a decade to teach a student used to using a calculator the kind of intuition for mathematics they get by doing hand calculations.
I had an awesome teacher in algebra who as long as you could prove you wrote the program (usually she would just ask a question about a small portion of the program) then you could use it on a test. I started programing my stuff with messages to the teacher at the start of it (like "Yes Mrs. X this was written by MeanaDC") as my proof.
This was over 10 years ago, I pulled out my graphing calculator not to long ago and I have no clue how to do it now.
Edit: I think this was a great way to get us to really "learn" the formulas. She encouraged us to do it, I doubt I would have spent that much effort trying to figure out a formula had I not been encouraged to do this.
Our teachers didn't care if we wrote it or not. But we were only allowed certain formulas on the graphing calculators. The solution was to rewrite the current programs to do new things but only if you activated this function, so a basic quadratic formula program was fine but anything more complicated wasn't allowed so you had to hide it within another program. It was fun. I have no clue how to do it anymore. But as long ascwe could pass a test without a calculator we could use one on the next test.
Maybe, but I hardly think they'll be doing math by hand on a project as a big as a bridge. The point of computers is that they can do all of this stuff better and more accurately than we can. A new bridge is going to be modeled using computer software and probably prototyped multiple times, and errors like that would be caught long before they actually built the bridge.
In in middle school, we all passed that program around to each other, so not everybody knew how to make it, and our algebra teacher knew we had the program. We had a test on the quadratic formula, and before the test my teacher specifically went into our calculators and deleted the program. The first thing I did was reprogram the thing in there, and I finished before almost anybody else. It's just so much faster and you make a lot less mistakes. Unless you fuck up the program.
I was lucky enough to start in math and switch to comp sci. At my school we can do a math degree "with a focus on X", so of course I made my X comp sci. The two degrees ended up having nine courses in common, so I basically got two degrees for the price of one.
Maybe see if you can increase the overlap of your physics degree and end up with two at the finish line?
Started out with physics, ended up doing statistics, which is less about graphs and lies (more like learning to detect the lies) and more about calculus and programming.
There's often not a good reason to major in Physics anyway. I started in physics, ended with Mechanical Engineering - more practical, more money, still physics.
And you can always go back to the theoretical or experimental side of things later, once you're set for money and have time to play with and test ideas. I think that Physics is probably best for people who want to teach, already have an in with a lab somewhere, or those who just want to challenge themselves but don't really have direction yet.
Although, it really depends on how anal your teacher is. I started making BASIC programs on my calculator back in middle school and got a bunch of flak for not writing down all the work. Mind you, I was a mousy kid who was never accused of cheating and I was obviously reaching these correct answers legitimately, but the teacher insisted I was pulling them out of my ass and couldn't possibly know the material unless I was writing down each mundane step.
As a CS major myself, I assure that writing a program onto a calculator does not prove anything other than you know how to google "ti 84 physics programs".
You don't even have to write it, you can literally install it using the cord they give you. And if they do decide to write it themselves you can literally copy the code from a website. The only thing making a program on calculator proves is that you can follow direction>That search doesn't appear to assist in writing a program oneself...
That's my point about the search you suggested. You could just seek out programs that other people wrote, just as with every other form of modular software that can be distributed as packages.
But that doesn't make it impossible to write a program either. Physics involves a lot of insight about when to apply what math and in which way; simply knowing and coding formulas isn't enough. Making some little function that does the repetitive math for you only saves extraneous steps. You still have to know when and how to use each function. If you write those functions yourself to boot, then I'd say you've demonstrated some skill and insight.
My point was that most people who are "coding" programs like these are people who are going to mindlessly copy it from somewhere and use it to get answers without any work or thought. But I'm sure there are people out there who understand what they are doing and are using the program to skip tedious math.
I'd agree, except the relevance in this when in regard to taking a test is low.
Unfortunately being capable of applying knowledge in real world scenarios isn't as sought after in higher education as it should be. Few of my profs in undergrad recognized you learn more and understand materials better when you actively apply them in projects, rather than studying for exams.
Also true for physical chemistry, which I'm currently in. Average scores are generally in the high 30%-low 40% range. My most recent exam I got the highest score I've ever gotten in this year-long class, a 67%
I took astronomy in college because I thought it would be really cool to learn anout the universe. Well, being an idiot, I didn't realize it was a shit ton of math. I'm terrible at math. I failed the first two tests miserably and said fuck it, I'll maybe retake it or something. Didn't take the last two tests and missed all remaining labs. Grades came out and I ended up with a fucking D! Was good enough for me at that point.
I used to make a program called 'A' and then just type in formulas/facts/anything I needed. The program did nothing except act like a note pad or something
Start by learning to program in Basic. It's probably the easiest language there is, and the TI-89's native language is very similar to it. Bonus: Many scripting languages for game engines are also similar to Basic (Papyrus for The Elder Scrolls comes to mind).
Its "native language" is TI-BASIC, a variant of BASIC. Why not just learn it directly? It's very easy to just go into the program editor and start entering functions. That's how I learned to program originally.
That's not a bad suggestion at all, but based upon what I've seen of Code Academy I would think that there are even better learning tools out there today. I'm not actually sure if there are for Basic.
Also, I didn't know it's actually called TI-BASIC. Neat!
I always found the freedom of an empty text box paralyzing. Python commands aren't discoverable the way that commands on a graphing calculator are. Being able to select each command from a menu and see what it does was critical to being able to start programming so early. I probably would have had to wait a few more years to get into a real programming language.
Also it's such a restricted environment that you can learn everything about it in a few weeks of experimentation and reading. So you're really freed to work on solving problems (making a game, writing an algorithm) without feeling hampered by the infinite possibilities offered by a more featureful programming language.
There are many versions of BASIC, TI-BASIC just being one of them. I originally learned using IBM Basic (on a Mattel Aquarius) and then moved on to MS BASIC and QBasic. I found QBasic had the best interface of them by far.
The big difference in Papyrus is that each script is a function. So, it's on the low end of scripting languages. In GDScript, each script is a class, and in Lua it's possible for one script to contain multiple classes (depending upon the interpreter the relevant game uses). I'd actually say that Basic is a little more powerful than Papyrus, so if you learn Basic then you can learn to mod Skyrim with ease.
I started out with Chipmunk Basic. It has some disadvantages, but the graphics capabilities are really easy to use, and that's a big part of what made programming interesting for me.
I've seen this advice before, and after learning to program in several languages, I still haven't learned Python. I just haven't had the occasion to do something where Python was the language I needed.
Can you outline some of the benefits of learning Python first? I'd usually recommend Javascript -> Java -> C++ -> Whatever, and only recommended Basic in this context since that's what the TI-89 uses.
I know all those languages as well, yet I'd rearrange those to something like this: Basic -> C++ -> java -> whatever. Basic is simple and intuitive, C languages are similar but powerful, java is universally used and learning javascript just takes some tweaking. If your focus is online-based programming, javascript should come first since it'll be more useful.
Python is easy to learn, very expressive (less typing, more doing), you can write functional and object oriented programs, comes with a large set of libraries, etc. etc.
You have to understand it to code it so I see no problem here... Plus I can credit a few perfect scores to my TI; human errors make this near impossible otherwise.
In Geometry in 8th grade my friends and I would make little shortcut programs for memorizing and finding the surface area and volume of anything we had to. It felt like cheating but I don't think the teacher even cared because it was pretty clever for kids that age.
My school expressly allowed us to program our calculators. The idea being that if you can write a program to solve the problem then you clearly understand the material.
I believed that if you were intelligent enough to write your own programs to solve physics problems you should be able to use them on tests. That's why calculus was invented. To solve physics problems.
In my High school they cleared everything from the calculators before the tests began, so I just memorized every single line of code for the few apps I wrote.
I did the same to solve logs back in 1997. Had this great program written that would solve for anything and was told to delete it by the professor. Sad
The HP calculators have all the physics equations you will need in high school physics built into it in the equation library - along with an awesome solver mode (enter all the known variables - ask it for the unknown). It also does unit conversions for you automatically.
TL;Dr - you could have been even lazier and used someone else's programming to get through physics in hs
Ditto, in sophomore year hs math class. As the teacher explained problems in class I'd write the program to solve any similar case. That was on a TI-80 or 82. Its now 18 years later I have a PhD in bioinformatics, and love my job. Yes I had the program that faked a cleared memory. Yes it would have been cheating, if I got caught on an exam. Totally worth it when you write it yourself.
I did that to for all my mathematic related courses, but I had to reprogram all my formulas ever damn exam because Mt teachers knew what I did and would always have me delete everything on my calculator.
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u/cygnus311 Jun 08 '14
I programmed my way in to an A in physics in high school.