| I'm largely of the opinion that aptitude has little to do with anything. It seems that a much bigger problem is our tools for teaching conceptual material are simply terrible. (I'm actually tempted to argue that our tools for teaching a wide variety of material are terrible, but conceptual stuff is especially bad.) http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-l... The link above is an article about how college level students in introductory physics classes have/are failing spectacularly to learn the basic principles of physics. The key parts: > While most physics students can recite Newton's second law of motion, Harvard's Mazur says, the conceptual test developed by Hestenes showed that after an entire semester they understood only about 14 percent more about the fundamental concepts of physics. When Mazur read the results, he shook his head in disbelief. The test covered such basic material. > "I gave it to my students only to discover that they didn't do much better," he says. > The test has now been given to tens of thousands of students around the world and the results are virtually the same everywhere. The traditional lecture-based physics course produces little or no change in most students' fundamental understanding of how the physical world works. Mazur notes later in the article that after making major changes in his teaching methods and moving away from lectures and towards student group discussions, the students' learned roughly three times as much material. This is a hilariously large increase, and I suspect it to be the low-hanging fruit as far as potential improvements. A hundred years ago, Maria Montessori developed methods of teaching that are largely the opposite of traditional lecture-based education systems. Students pursue goals largely independently and at their own pace. She developed materials that grounded complex concepts in the real world - my favorite examples of which are the binomial and trinomial cubes. Here's a link that explains how and why the binomial cube, which represents an algebraic (and fairly complex!) concept, is a material provided to 4-5 year old students: http://www.montessoriworld.org/sensory/sbinoml.html Today, we have computer games that allow us to discard the limits of physical reality. We can create interactive software to teach or prepare students for concepts that might not be possible with physical materials. Why explain the principles of ecology when you could create a simulated, manipulable world that teaches the user simply by interacting with it? Why not have discussions and lectures following this, once the core material has already been presented and experimented with so that the students can begin with at least a partial understanding? Learning to program doesn't strike me as any more difficult than learning any other subject. Occasional posts show up here about how someone is teaching their child to program - often well before their teen years. What separates those children from the average child other than economic situation and available opportunities? |