Ross Werner wrote:
Certainly! I just think it takes longer than most schools have,
unfortunately. (Uh oh, I feel a long rant coming on about a gigantic
education reform needed ... must ... repress ...)
That's what blogs are for. ;-)
I've had a few excellent instructors who did indeed show why the
subject was interesting. I long for more of those precious few.
I sat here writing (more or less) how I disagreed, but then I remembered
a particular CS class--Artificial Intelligence, where we made bzflag
tanks move around. That class was *waaay* more interesting than it would
have been if we had simply studied the theory. Why? Because we applied
what we learned to something interesting. I don't remember hardly
anything about minimax, because we didn't program that into our tank,
but I remember Kalman filters and and potential fields because they're
what made our tanks blast the heck out of the enemy tanks :)
That's a great example, although AI is a bit of a special case since the
way to practice AI in the real world is to further develop the theory.
From what I can tell, AI practice is never far from theory.
Of course, this is simply an example of learning the theory alongside
practical application of it, not learning practical applications
*before* learning the theory. What do you think of that sort of teaching
methodology, learning them alongside each other?
That works too, as long as the instructor can still make a clear
distinction between theory and practice. If the instructor presents
both at the same time, the students are probably going to have a hard
time distinguishing the two. One way to separate them is to teach
practice for a week or two, then theory for a week or two, etc. Another
way to separate them might be to have two instructors. Or how about
this: the instructor teaches theory from the left side of the room and
practice from the right side of the room. It could be a nice comical
effect!
Does this lessen the amount of theory a person is able to learn and
retain, or does it increase it? (I fear getting flamed by people who
would say this sort of approach turns Universities into trade schools ...)
I think practice with theory increases the students' ability to learn
theory, but the risk of slipping into too many practical details is
real. There must be some way to avoid that risk.
Shane
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