Is technical education getting too...technical?

[Khendraja'aro]

Do your own homework

Spoilsport!

[Flixy]

We do offer some fun, "look at us blow shit up" courses

We had a decently sized tesla coil presentation for Electromagnetics 1

We've spent the past few years trying to make freshmen courses more accessible mostly by improving the TA sessions; we spend more time showing examples and trying to encourage students to solve problems within the session over blithely prattling the correct answers to the previous set of home-work exercises. But that's simply shifting the focus of the more hands-on teaching, the kids still have to learn what the fuck it is we're trying to show them, and that explicitly involves having them do it by themselves, no matter how dry or boring it is. I can't make an integral sign blow students no matter how hard I try.

That's what they do here. It helps a lot of students, but there's still a high number of people who simply didn't expect that studying physics means 20+ hours a week of dry math.

For what it's worth, they are quite honest about it at my university, if you do poorly you get a talk from someone explaining how tough it is, and that if you're really not up for it, quitting may not be a bad idea. They also offer help on how to tackle the courses and pass them, of course, but if you don't do well at all in your first year they strongly recommend dropping out. And the student recruiting has a weird schism - on the one hand they want as many students to come to their university as possible, because that's good for them - but at the same time you do not want to encourage people who will drop out anyway.

There's plenty of cool shit you can do with calculus, why not give students a taste of it? The article is basically talking about giving students a chance to apply what they've learned as they're learning it. It seems to me that this would a) remind them why they're putting themselves through this stuff b) function as a reward mechanism c) reinforce what they've learned.

Alternatively, you could just make it into a MMORPG.

When the math gets abstract, there's not much of the plenty of cool shit you can do with it, as far as I know. It may have very useful and interesting applications, but those are usually a bit beyond the grasp of freshmen and would only make it even more complicated... I honestly wouldn't know how to make our freshmen year math any more interesting than they made it now.