There is no correlation between better educational outcomes and higher teacher pay. Washington has the highest teacher pay and the smallest classrooms yet is below average in educational outcomes. Stop this canard, it just isn't true. US Schools have plenty of money, they just don't spend it wisely. In fact, both Mississippi and Louisiana have better outcomes than Washington state despite the fact they have half the spend per student.
The Washington schools constantly ask for more money so they can teach. I don't see what monetary resources are needed to teach arithmetic beyond a blackboard and chalk.
Projectors, videos, computers, tablets, calculators, are all completely useless in teaching math.
I have a great deal of respect for you. Your math skills are much greater than my own. But you have stretched your statement too far. Flash cards can be very helpful in teaching math. Timed tests for math facts can be very helpful. Both of these can be facilitated with computers or tablets. Animations can be a very useful instructional tool. Even taking a picture of the chalk on the blackboard and putting it online can help students (and possibly helpful parents) review the in-class lecture from home while they do their homework.
I don't dismiss your overall point, but don't be too flippant. A video of the lecture can be very helpful.
I mostly agree with you. However, if you imagine yourself sitting down with a set of exercises that you need to figure out how to do, it is true that some well-chosen animations / models will be helpful in that process.
You have to do the exercises. But it might be beyond your ability to start doing them straight from the textbook. Crafted didactic material can walk you through initial exercises to the point where you have a theory of where to begin on another one. Or it can let you investigate a structure until you have an idea.
In your analogy, if you want to be able to bench 150 pounds, at some point you'll have to bench 150 pounds. But a nonconfigurable 150 pound weight isn't the best way to get there. You can have a set of weights that let you start with easier tasks. You can have a set of exercises that aren't bench pressing. Those things are helpful, and generally required.
I watched "The Mechanical Universe" videos on newtonian mechanics. They used lots of animations. I found the animations to be too fast and too distracting to be of any use.
The series was created by Dr Goodstein, who was my freshman physics prof. I understood the same material via him scribbling on the blackboard.
I've seen other animations of mathematics, with the same result - confusion.
I suspect the problem is that an animation does not build a mental model in your head. Carefully examining the diagrams and the equations does.
What you've discovered is your learning style. It's not the same for everyone so it's an important thing that everyone should discover about themself.
There are visual learners out there. Being a visual learner doesn't mean you don't need to do the work, it means you typically need some visualization for things to click, and then you practice applying it like everyone else. Some people can even manage with just lectures.
This causes some students trouble in school because their needs may not be met by every teacher. It's especially worse if the student hasn't learned what their learning style is yet.
I have difficulty believing that my learning style is uncommon. Consider trying to build muscle. There are techniques that are proven to work best. There are no individual "muscle building styles" that work better, unless the person has a disability.
And I don't believe that in general the kids in classes are mentally disabled.
I think it's more of a motivation problem. Not all students are eager to learn. They may not be interested in the subject for whatever reason. It's hard to teach someone who isn't open to it. Learning styles can help bring some of those barriers down by shifting the material into a form that they are more open to.
The same applies to building muscle. Not everyone is self-motivated to do it. There are different ways to motivate people to work out. But in the end they all need to do the work/practice.
All good examples but all relatively low cost as well (and don’t require 1:1 student-laptops). However I’m pretty darn sure that videos do more harm than good - too easy to zone out during them, and providing them to students only allows them to slack in class with the attitude “I can just watch the video again later.” Despite being horribly inefficient this is true for students of virtually all ages. Providing videos to those who ask only might help.
The real problem beyond all this is that the educational spending goes to the wrong spots. If you ask me, teachers should be empowered to select their own curriculum using a budget and most of the rest of the money should go towards paid tutors, better teacher-student ratios, etc (and probably way fewer administrators). I am firmly convinced that a lot of kids act out because they can’t grasp the material, not in spite of it.
I cynically suspect that most people just cannot stand the idea that a teacher and a blackboard works better than all those technological crutches.
I remember when "educational" CD-ROMs came out for classrooms. The pitch was that at any time, a student could go look up the corresponding text on the CD-ROM.
Once I was at a presentation, and the presenter didn't show up. The organizer asked if anyone in the audience was willing to substitute. I raised my hand, and asked for nothing more than a whiteboard and markers.
It was the best presentation I ever did. It was a lot of fun, and the crowd was very engaged.
In the USA there are approximately 50 million students aged 5-18. If you paid for each student to get 1:1 attention one day a week, you would need one teacher per five students in schools that meet five days a week. Let's use that number because it reduces 50 million students nicely to 10 million teachers. Let's pay each teacher $70K/year. That would cost $700 billion per year.
The USA military spent $100 billion per year in Afghanistan.
If the USA provided the 1:1 attention only in 1st Grade and 3rd Grade, they could fund it with the same commitment they made in Afghanistan with a lot fewer deaths. The USA persisted in Afghanistan for 20 years. Shall we experiment with education for 10 years and see if we get a better result than we did in Afghanistan?
Even if the money had been available. you can't just spawn millions of teachers out of nothing. there aren't that many people who can and want to do the job.
Show me the lobbyist who will push for giving 700 billion a year to teachers.
That 100 billion goes to a bunch of extremely well-connected businesses who fund lobbyists to make sure the USA continues expending munitions in a series of utterly pointless, futile, wars.
I believe 1:1 is fundamentally different than ever 1:2 ratio. So, even if you can have 3 person classrooms, I don't think it would be the same as 1:1 time.
As soon as you are working with more than one student, you have to teach the common denominator, which may or may not (more often not) be the thing that will most help any of the students.
In 1:1, you can identify were the specific gaps in skill, knowledge are and tailor the session to close them. Personalized.
Plenty of places have relatively high teacher pay, relative high staffing (for instance 1 teacher + 1 assistant per 25 children is standard here - not quite 1/10 but pretty close). The educational outcomes are bad and getting worse.
I can sign in to DigID without using my phone, except sometimes with an SMS verification code. (Of course they want to, and should, phase that out. Hopefully that won't be replaced by app store dependence.)
What alternative is there, today, that would allow securely doing this without an app store dependency?
Only a few EU countries have rolled out NFC-based eID functionality (as only physical ICAO-based ID verification via NFC is a mandatory part of the EU ID card standard); those are the only ones with a viable path forward in the short term.
Lots of translucent blobs composited to produce the appearance of a strawberry.
There is no mesh or model. The visual surface of the strawberry could be made up of blobs spaced far apart physically and not where the surface appears to be.
This is why they are called radiance fields, they model the light not the geometry.
Practically the blobs positions/rotations can be constrained to better physically match the geometry of a strawberry.
I'm not sure i agree. The blobs are exactly where the surface appear to be because they are constrained by multiple viewing angles.
Otherwise the splat would fall apart as soon as the viewing angle is changed slightly (Which it absolutely does in many examples on supersplat, you cannot really create an out of distribution view with 3GS, it's not magic)
Yes, my statement was loose. The blob doesn’t really have a position since it is theoretically an infinite distribution in 3 space.
It has a mean, and that mean doesn’t have to lie on the surface, consider the case where the mean is deep inside the strawberry but its spike contributes to the surface appearance (e.g a seed could be represented this way, or it could be represented by a small well-oriented blob on the surface, the optimiser doesn’t care)
Others have provided details about how it works. I suggest zooming way in on that image and you'll start 'breaking though' the surface and that'll help you get an idea of how it works. Important thing is there is no defined geometric surface ("mesh"). Also important to know is that it's very, very hard to get a good splat without taking a ton of photos at different angles. It's also really, really easy to create a crappy looking splat. But when it's done right, it's a marvel
When you say its very very hard to create a good splat, what do you mean? And what is good? I would say that strawberry is very detailed and its a good splat. I also kind of like the way some of the 'rougher' splats look. I feel like they'd work well in a car racing simulator.
Oh thanks - I was waiting for a moment where I could turn up sound to watch the other video, but I didn't realise that that would set me back half an hour. This is the perfect amount of background for now!
The prime motivator for it is a certain user experience. I'm not sure they've found the best developer experience for providing that user experience, but I'm also not sure that a better DX is possible - the whole concept has quite a bit of inherent complexity, I'm afraid.
(The conclusion could, of course, also be that it's just not feasible to create that kind of user experience. Luckily, traditional patterns still work just as well.)
If you look at the origins, the primary motivation was finding a way to get a good data loading developer experience without having to adopt Relay and GraphQL.
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