On Saturday my niece sent a few photos from her son's robotics competition. While standardized components and a simple scripting language are used, there's a lot of room for learning and creativity. Winning teams spend much of their time modifying the basic design along with moving to more sophisticated programming languages. The basic hardware is quite expensive so many of the groups are sponsored by their schools and sometimes local businesses. It seems like a great way for kids who like to build things and play computer games to learn a bit of engineering and programming. My niece's son isn't interested in math or science at school, but loves to build things. It's a path that has him learning. Given the right advisor there could be a lot of learning. It's also a nice example of using technology as a teaching vehicle.
Sometimes new technologies are seen as a way to cheat. I've read that some teachers worry that language models like GPT-3 will give students easy access to ghost-written essays. Of course there's still the problem of students buying essays from human, but this may be cheaper and easier to get. One can imagine a number of ways to deal with this. A teacher might ask something like "based on the debate Adam and Sally were having last Tuesday, how would you.." Indexicality - pointing to something in the context in which it occurs - is something these language models can't address. Better still may be to focus on critical thinking in the class and test on something that isn't a simple regurgitation. Essays seem like a very uncreative way to teach writing and critical thinking skills. And there will probably be teachers who figure out how to involve language models as a tool to teach creative thinking. That would be a leap similar to using robotics competitions to teach shop, basic engineering and programming skills.
I'd like to see changes in how science and math are taught in high school. Currently there's a push to eliminate areas most students will rarely use. I'd counter that by teaching the subjects in a way to improve critical thinking. Pure math may be a way forward, not the "new math" that crashed and burned in the 60s, but big ideas. It doesn't have to be about formal proofs and calculations (although tools like Mathematica and Maple can be useful experimentation and visualization tools). I've probably belabored it before, but simple topology, infinity, the continuum, maps, abstraction, inference and model building. None of this has to be taught with rigor, but playing with them can open pathways students have never thought about. Sure teach some of the regular math, but it doesn't have to be so repetitive. I'd add probability and risk analysis as well as personal finance. The same with science - do away with memorization and focus on the concepts and how we arrived at them. Of course extra points for making it playful like the robotics competition.
But I'm not a k-12 educator so all of this may be silly.
And for college here's something by the wonderful Woodie Flowers of MIT on changes he'd made to university engineering curriculum and beyond. (Woodie was one of the most innovative teachers at MIT)
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