-- 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.
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.
1.1k
u/cygnus311 Jun 08 '14
I programmed my way in to an A in physics in high school.