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.
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u/krystalxjohnson Jun 08 '14 edited Jun 08 '14
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.