You've broken the site guidelines badly here. Can you please not do that? Comments like this are not what this site is for, and destroy what it is for.
"A good critical comment teaches us something." That's what I thought I was doing.
I did not intend to break the rules badly (nor do I believe I did; I didn't fulminate nor called names). Instead I was called names by others replying to me. I will not participate in HN anymore.
People learn better when it is fun, playful, and seems to relate to or be useful for things they care about. Doing so is part of teaching it “head on” and teaching it well.
I’ve actually been teaching my 2nd grade son Math recently though Minecraft- things like using euclidean coordinates, triangulating positions, etc. we’re both having fun and he’s learning valuable ideas.
You seem to have a dry, joyless, and uninspired view of math and how it should be taught. Traditional math education has done an impressive job of turning something incredibly fun and useful into something that seems stodgy, dry, and pointless.
I’ve always had a fun playful view of math that I learned from my own parents and mentors, and I think that is what has led me to continue studying and using math to solve real world scientific problems as an adult.
The "quit having fun" meme immediately springs to mind[1]. I, personally, know damn well that if this was around when I was at this level of mathematics I'd probably enjoy the field a bit more instead of growing a life-long hate and fear of math
Re: "I’ve actually been teaching my 2nd grade son Math" - it seems to me you proved the parent poster's point: this type of scientific communication is better suited for middle-school audience than university audience. A blog post seems more appropriate than posting it on arxiv.com with full academic credentials...
Math education techniques are a legitimate field of research worthy of publication. Science education is an academic field that publishes just like any other. Arxiv is a preprint server and not a journal - they don’t discriminate based on “impact” or interest to a certain audience. If you want that, read a journal that meets your desired criteria. It is perfectly reasonable to publish methods for educating children, or even results intended for an audience of children in Arxiv. A key purpose of a preprint server is to circumvent gatekeeping.
Absolutely- there is no reason children can’t and shouldn’t learn science by participating as it is done by real scientists- reading and even writing and publishing their own papers. I am an academic PI and am involved within teaching science by directly involving undergrads and even school aged children in real research, and having them write and publish their own papers as primary author. The idea of gatekeeping science as not for children is awful in my opinion.
Moreover, just because Minecraft is a video game doesn’t mean it has no place in real scientific research- it is a virtual world with a modular plugin system that can allow a researcher to create and interact with simulations of almost any type of system imaginable. People have executed realistic physics experiments, designed working cpus, etc in it. I think there is a lot of potential for really significant research within it.
Are you simply trolling or just so cynical that you can't read about some people having fun with mathematics on computers on a site called Hacker News without feeling the need to insult a whole discipline and building strawmen?
I don't know what you think the "math education problem" is, but I guarantee that being nasty to people is not the way to solve it.
I agree with the parent poster. A blog post seems more appropriate for these types of fun (math-related) activities. The Try Things on Your Own sections seems more appropriate for middle-schoolers / high-schoolers than University students/professors.
At least this was not supported by an NSF grant (There are problems more deserving of NSF grants than approximating pi with square blocks.)
I don’t think the arXiv makes any claim to require a minimum level of originality or contribution to the state of the art, beyond “write it up as a paper in full academic prose and it can’t just be a proposal”, especially in a history and overview subsection dedicated to exposition. The authors have a pretty good claim for getting published in an expository journal like, say, the MAA Monthly.
(Also, I don’t think this is any surprise to you, but an NSF proposal requires engagement with the literature, and a statement of contributions.)
Oh no, how dare educators do outreach to the next generation of people who might be interested in their field...
> "just teach it head on, and teach it well."
Seriously, as someone who was an assistant-teacher at university for a year, few things annoy me more than people with very strong opinions on education, whose confidence is very clearly based on not knowing the slightest thing about how education works.
Good luck trying to brute-force information into unwilling brains. Especially in a form where there is no connection back to the lived experience of the people being taught, meaning they have no point of entry.
Or perhaps your point is that we shouldn't do outreach, and only the people who already found maths on their own are allowed into this exclusive club of people who consider themselves oh so intelligent? Like being in favor the mathematicians equivalent of a "gatekeeping hipster" attitude?
Honestly, I don't know which interpretation looks worse.
I don't think either of those was GP's intent. I think it's more of a lament about anti-intellectual and anti-engineering culture in the U.S.
I interpret it that you shouldn't need these gimmicks to get people interested in math, but rather change the system so people would be more interested in those jobs or fields, by making engineers, academics and teachers into more respected members of the society.
I am from Czechia and I see this as a feature of neoliberal capitalism. The socialist movement, both in the Western and Eastern bloc, had a lot of emphasis on educating people. China now does something similar. But under neoliberalism, the respect of people is tied to money-making or entrepreneurship. This view, critical of low priority of education under neoliberalism, seems to be shared by many people outside the U.S. today.
I do have a soft spot in my heart for Soviet popular science and mathematics books, especially those that do recreational explorations - anyone of any age can enjoy them, but to someone young enough I’m sure they would’ve been totally engrossing.
I think showing students well formatted papers about approachable subjects is a great idea that more teachers should adopt! What's wrong with modeling the actual domain? "Serious mathematicians" communicate by publishing papers, but for some reason my only exposure to papers was on my own time outside of school, where they were largely intractable. This includes college math and physics courses.
> Is this a stunt to attract US students to mathematics research?
Like how the bowling ball pendulum lab is a stunt to attract students to physics, and the Briggs-Rauscher reaction a stunt to attract students to chemistry?
Sure, why not. Define "stunt" broadly enough and it can include anything which piques the interest.
> Why does it seem that everyone bends over backwards in the US instead of confronting the math education problem head on?
Why does it seem you have no joy?
> don't approximate it with video games, just teach it head on
This is head-on teaching how to approximate the values of four different mathematical constants.
You don't even get to the Minecraft way to approximate Apéry's constant until you've read that it's a special case of the Riemann zeta , and seen two ways to define it (as an infinite sum and as an infinite product), in order to explain why the Minecraft method works.
First, a ton of arXiv articles are fairly low quality so nothing new there. Published math research though is of a fairly high quality but mostly irrelevant and too specialized. I doubt it is a stunt. Rather, it's probably a sign of late-stage research boredom where all the useful stuff has been done and now there's not much else to do but invent arcane puzzles for amusement.
Monte Carlo integration to compute pi is not an arcane puzzle, given how often it's taught. We did it in my undergrad numerical methods course. In Fortran.
I don't think any of these are arcane puzzles for someone who wants a mathematical career, which is the target audience (see, 'likely one of the first irrational numbers you encountered in your mathematical career').
This is for undergraduate education. A 20 year old now was 6 years old when Minecraft came out. A 20 year old now studying math has very likely played a lot of Minecraft.
Also, the authors' respective institutions don't have a graduate level math program. Lynch's personal research is in combinatorics ("particularly connections between combinatorics and representation theory, topological combinatorics") and Weselcouch's is in "enumerative and algebraic combinatorics".
Rather than attribute it to "late-stage research boredom", why not interpret it as two young math professors (they are both in their 30s, I think) coming up with interesting ideas for their undergrad, math-interested students?
> Rather than attribute it to "late-stage research boredom", why not interpret it as two young math professors (they are both in their 30s, I think) coming up with interesting ideas for their undergrad, math-interested students?
Because I believe that is what the ultimate aim of research is these days: to attract more young minds to eventually contribute to meaningless pursuits.
America is a democracy and demonstrably most people's priority is not good education when it comes to schooling.
A significant portion of the people who reject the school system do so entirely based on fundamentalist religious reason, specifically things like "evolution is a thing" and "here's how you have safe sex".
The primary driver of American school boards in some states literally seems to be getting the bible into American schools for some reason.
Don't make things up, people don't reject "here's how you have safe sex". Maybe some individuals do, but majority of parents support calm and thorough explanation that sex exists and that's how adults do that safely so you 16yo's won't regret it later.
The problem is that thanks to 1% of overly active idiots it quicky degraded to "gender affirming closets" at our libraries and transgender lessons for 4th graders.
>The problem is that thanks to 1% of overly active idiots it quicky degraded to "gender affirming closets" at our libraries and transgender lessons for 4th graders.
they don't want people to have command over powerful symbols because it makes men smarter, that would be bad for universities
they deliberately make people lost, even your thought of "upfront" teaching which might but maybe not include the current status of throwing 50 formula questions at students for years,
when it has to do with maths oriented people should be given the primordial understanding that every historical mathematician was working with, knowing some basic enough greek, beginning with symbols and deriving just simple things and binary and incompleteness, etc.. instead we've made a few generations of absolute fakes with ZERO taste for symbolic beauty, because some symbols are not permitted by the party.. does the number 2001 or 1984 scare you?
