Clearly it is vastly more logical and practical for a few people to develop the lessons really well, and put them [online]. ​ The teaching role of universities, especially for large popular subjects, will inevitably change from providing primarily learning content to providing primarily assessment, support and certification.

I’ve realized that a big part of the problem with mathematics education around the world might be that: the second piece of the picture—algorithmic computation—is a lot easier to teach than either the first—conceptual understanding—or the third—problem solving.

I am in Austria right now; having spent a week in Innsbruck visiting Hans-Peter Schroeker and Manfred Husty, I am now in Graz at the Technical University, and I am talking with Anton Gfrerrer, Sybi…

Designing media to reflect how people think and learn

In math, we might show a student a peer’s strategy, then ask them to solve a new variant of the problem. In the humanities, we might show a student a peer’s essay beside their own, then ask them to draw lines between all the places they and their peer were making the same argument.

These $100 calculators have been required in classrooms for more than twenty years, as students and teachers still struggle to afford them

This is "GORUCO 2014 - Samantha John, Jason Brennan - Designing a better Programmer Community" by Gotham Ruby Conference on Vimeo, the home for high quality…

So even a little familiarity—the amount you gain from one steely sit-down with the thing—can dislodge major chunks of fear. For good.

of work I poured into our course blog. Every student contributed two posts to the blog, and I gave multiple rounds of detailed feedback on all twelve posts, learning a lot from the students in the process. ​ and especially not Jekyll, since having a working Ruby environment is the hardest problem in computer science

I co-wrote a book I’m quite proud of and from what I hear it has helped many people learn what they wanted to learn and get started writing Haskell

and pay more attention to consolidation, exposition and preservation of the knowledge we already have. more room for quiet study and reflection.

And close reading is intimately tied to the kind of “close thinking” that math requires, especially the more advanced, theoretical kind of math. You need to be able to pass back and forth flexibly between the micro and the macro. You need to see both the big picture and the minutiae, both the forest and the trees.

and throughout the process instilling ownership, confidence, and competence among the students. ​ Under my approach, a student taking an exam is handed a sheaf of all the reading-summaries she’s written, class by class. It’s an open-book exam where each student has written her own book, if she���s availed herself of the opportunity. If the student knows this ahead of time, there’s a big incentive for writing that book, which requires that she keep up with the reading during the weeks preceding the exam. ​ One thing my students tell me is that they often end up not consulting the summaries at all during an exam, but that they’re still glad they wrote them. My students will spend much of their time after graduation solving problems for which no solution-sheet exists and trying to convince others that their solutions will work. To do that well, they need to acquire communication skills, which I can help them cultivate now by having them present solutions to their peers and get feedback on those presentations.

For the rest of her life, my grandmother told this story to pretty much everyone she met. When I visited her at the assisted living facility for the next decade—where she loved living as it gave her independence—even the janitors would greet me as the granddaughter who had gone to the United States to get a doctorate, and whose committee had applauded my grandmother. She told this story to people she sat next to in the ferry; she told this to anyone who asked her about her life.

The title was approved because at the time Cornell lacked any professional titles for people with academic appointments focused solely, or mostly, on teaching with little or no expectation of engagement in research.

@JadeMasterMath: There are lots of mathematical concepts which don’t have well written resources to learn about them. I think that explaining something in a clear way with a story arc can sometimes be enough. @jeremyjkun: Write about the topics that you learned, where there was a succinct phrase, picture, or idea that suddenly made it clear. Then arrange the whole blog post around getting the reader to that same understanding.

Thinking about the relationship between pieces was an exercise in frustration, a continual feeling that the solution was just out of reach, as concentrating on one part would push some other critical piece of knowledge out of my head. ​ Why do we leave material out of classes and then fail students who can't figure out that material for themselves? Why do we make the first couple years of an engineering major some kind of hazing ritual, instead of simply teaching people what they need to know to be good engineers? For all the high-level talk about how we need to plug the leaks in our STEM education pipeline, not only are we not plugging the holes, we're proud of how fast the pipeline is leaking.

A paradigm is sneaking in when you aren’t paying attention. Pay attention. There’s a chance here to influence development practice for decades ​ We really can have languages that give the benefits of tomorrow without losing all the working components of today. I think Swift can be one of those languages. ​ Much of that, I believe, is education.

But it is quite difficult to find a level of teaching which is comprehensible and at the same time interesting to an entire class with heterogeneous background. The shape of the mathematics education of a typical student is tall and spindly. It reaches a certain height above which its base can support no more growth, and there it halts or fails. But once you really understand it and have the mental perspective to see it as a whole, there is often a tremendous mental compression.

In July 2019, ICMS hosted a workshop on Category Theory.  During the workshop, Eugenia Cheng (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) gave a public lecture entitled Inclusion-Exclusion in mathematics and beyond: who stays in, who falls out, why it happens and what we could do about it. This is a recording of that talkThis talk has captions.  To turn the captions off, press CC on the bottom toolbar.

Viewed through this lens, Sponsors can be understood as a first, important stepping stone towards company sponsorships, which seem inevitable for GitHub given the presence of Organization accounts. ​ Their eyes light up when they talk about specific developers. If I ask why, I tend to hear a few common responses: 1) they’re learning a specific skill, and watching that person is helpful, or 2) they’re experienced developers who just love being able to see how “the best” do it. ​ it struck me the other day that open source is a sort of “high-latency streaming”. ​ the relationship between a prominent GitHub developer and their audience, and a prominent Twitch streamer and their audience, is similar: they gain followers because people enjoy watching them do something in public. ​ an additional set of motivations, which is, “I want to watch and learn from you”. A graphic artist or a blogger who’s funded on Patreon doesn’t quite have that same relationship to their audience. In those cases, I think their output – the artifacts they create – takes center stage. ​ there are probably others who just love watching the person who makes it. ​ With companies, open source developers are selling a product. With individuals, they’re selling themselves.

Make friends, make love, make lots of things. Make something great. Because that is what will make you happy for the rest of your life. I don’t think it’s luck. I work insanely hard, all the time.

There's also a useful version of such critical remarks which can be made. One wants two things: (a) remarks which help people understand their own potential better; and (b) remarks which help people better understand what's involved in working in a particular field.— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) November 24, 2018

The event will take place in February 2019, and the deadline to apply is November 8th. If you are interested, but can't make it to NYC, please fill out the "can't make it" form on our site as we'd love to hear from you: https://t.co/l4CQUiU1Ow— Gary Chou (@garychou) October 22, 2018

I’ve written about the class I’d like to teach, but what I’ve been thinking about lately is the class I’d like to attend. Not necessarily now, but when I was growing up. In the 6th grade, let’s say…

The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?