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by helterskelter 14 days ago
OT, but if we made kids learning math use log tables and slide rules for all their calculations I expect that they would engage their brains more and actually think about what they were doing, ie: form a strategy to solve a problem before they started calculating. Also I think that they would get a better "feel" for working numbers in general. I have no evidence, but I suspect that by abstracting away a lot of the "gruntwork" of calculating, we've really hampered people's development in math.

Unfortunately this adds quite a bit of overhead and would make everything take a lot more time. It might be worth it though.
2 comments
saulpw 14 days ago
I'm working on this! https://magworld.pw
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smoothbraindev 14 days ago
This is really cool! After entering the software field, I felt uncomfortable not having a sense of relative size while working with digital storage units. Piece of mind was achieved after sitting down and mapping the units (Gb, Mb, etc) to common artifacts(audio file, plain text, database).

I've been planning forever to do something similar with length, duration, power, etc.

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saulpw 14 days ago
That's basically what we're doing! I'd be curious if it helps you. Send me an email if you wind up listening to or reading anything from the site.
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helterskelter 14 days ago
Looks interesting, I'll give this a listen and a read. :)
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Izkata 14 days ago
> Also I think that they would get a better "feel" for working numbers in general.

This is called "number sense". I'm pretty sure we do have evidence under searches for that term, it was well-enough known as a concept when I was in school decades ago and is the reason we don't use calculators when first learning math.

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LelouBil 14 days ago
Having done a bit of teaching/grading for computer science, I don't know how to do it reliably nowadays.

For math we ask the whole reasoning and not just the answer, but here what do you do ?

What I resorted to is a live code review with the student, and it becomes very quickly apparent if they know the code, know what the AI said about the code, or didn't bother to read the code at all.

But it's way more time and effort.

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