On 8/4/2011 6:19 PM, Alan Kay wrote:
Here's the link to the paper
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2005001_learning.pdf
inference:
it is not that basic math and physics are fundamentally so difficult to
understand...
but that many classes portray them as such a confusing and incoherent
mess of notation and gobbledygook that no one can really make sense of it...
old stale/dead rant follows:
it is like, one year, with the help of a physics book,
google+wikipedia+mathworld, and good old trial and error, I proceed to
write a (basically functional, but not particularly "good") rigid body
physics engine.
several years later, I took a physics class, with a teacher that comes
off like Q (calling everyone stupid, comparing the students with dogs,
...) and writes out esoteric mathematical gobbledygook beyond my
abilities to make much sense of (filled with set-notation and other
unrecognized symbols and notations, some in common with first-order
logic, like the inverted A and backwards E, ..., and others unknown...).
actually, it was sort of like the big glob of muck at the end of R5RS:
what is it? what does it mean? ... but at least in that case, one didn't
have to understand it to pass the tests.
granted, much of what I understand of the topic came from a book from
1967 or similar, which didn't generally have any of this (the book
presented the topic mostly with algebraic notation, some trigonometry, ...).
granted, yes, maybe one can argue that the fundamentals of the field
changed or something in the decades since then or something, but for
most practical purposes, algebraic notation should still work (or maybe
add in some vector math to make things look nicer and be 3D-ready).
it shouldn't need to be this difficult though.
granted, yes, this sort of thing may be why people don't really tend to
understand things like how gravity works, as first they have to isolate
the ideas from so much mathematical muck.
granted, I have also seen in introductory programming classes just how
poorly many of the students seem to grasp some of the basics of
programming (struggling with things like variable declarations, loops,
understanding why never-called functions fail to do anything, ...), so I
guess ultimately it is kind of similar (in an almost sad way,
programming really doesn't seem like it should be all that difficult
from the POV of someone with a fair amount of experience with it).
but, at the same time, there would also be nothing good to be gained by
belittling or being condescending towards newbies...
or such...
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