Lunch Talk: (Authors at Google) Learning how to learn math and sciece

In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to effectively learning math and science—secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they’d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there’s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions—you just need the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. In short, studying a problem in a laser-focused way until you reach a solution is not an effective way to learn math. Rather, it involves taking the time to step away from a problem and allow the more relaxed and creative part of the brain to take over.

The creative aspect of learning math and science is somewhat similar to elements of creativity necessary for developing user scenarios in hard-core technology solutions.

Learning computer science - a new priority and a new problem

According to a new Gallup-Google poll,

Nine in 10 parents say offering opportunities to learn computer science is a good use of resources at their child's school, and about as many (91%) want their child to learn more computer science in the future.
...
Most parents say computer science learning is at least as important to a student's future success as required courses such as math, science, history and English.

The figure above shows an "implementation gap" between parents and school superintendents. Somehow, superintendents need to fit a new subject into an existing school curriculum, hire teachers, and provide accreditation. Since school budgets are practically fixed, computer science would have to replace another important subject - a typical trade-off situation, which will not lead to a breakthrough. Unfortunately, Gallup didn't ask parents which subject they want their children to stop learning.

An alternative solution would be to introduce an entirely new curriculum based on the online education model. The 21% of the parents is a good initial market. In the future, we should see an emergence of private high schools with emphasis on online STEM + CS.

tags: education, computer, science, trade-off, problem

Principles of Invention and Innovation (BUS 74). Session 1, Quiz 2

Research shows* that college students who use their laptops and mobile phones in class get easily distracted and miss important information. They also distract their professors and other students.

Question: How would IDEAL education and personal communications systems would change the situation?

* Michael J. Berry , Aubrey Westfall. Dial D for Distraction: The Making and Breaking of Cell Phone Policies in the College Classroom . College Teaching. Vol. 63, Iss. 2, 2015. DOI:10.1080/87567555.2015.1005040 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/87567555.2015.1005040

Invention of the Day: Kindergarten, learning by playing.

In 1837 Friedrich Fröbel, a German educator, founded care, playing and activity institute for small children in Bad Blankenburg. Three years later he came up with a short name for his creation - Kindergarten. Fröbel's idea was based on an insight that young children learn best while playing, rather than working on specific tasks assigned by the teacher in a formal school environment. Remarkably, Fröbel himself was an orphan and never had children of his own. His entire life was devoted to educating other people's children.

Although today the concept of "learning by playing" seems obvious, in the 19th century it seemed revolutionary and even subversive. In 1851, the Prussian government banned all Kindergatens as “atheistic and demagogic” for its alleged “destructive tendencies in the areas of religion and politics”.

Most societies in the developed world have adopted the Kindergarten model as a key part of formal elementary school education. In the US, kindergarten education is compulsory from age 5 or 6. Kids must learn by playing!

From an innovator perspective, the Kindergarten education "technology" succeeded because it 1) leveraged young children's natural ability to learn by playing; 2) helped parents, especially working women who didn't have neither time nor educational background, to prepare their children for school. As education became a critical element of a person's social success, the market for Kindergarten expanded worldwide.

tags: invention, innovation, education, gaming, dominant design

(Not so secret) Secrets of Creativity

Below are a few quotes from an Atlantic article about creativity studies. [ To BUS 74 students: I recommend reading the entire thing.]

- creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.

- having a high IQ is not equivalent to being highly creative. ...above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity: most creative people are pretty smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured by conventional intelligence tests. An IQ of 120, indicating that someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered sufficient for creative genius.

- Although we have a definition of creativity that many people accept—the ability to produce something that is novel or original and useful or adaptive—achieving that “something” is part of a complex process, one often depicted as an “aha” or “eureka” experience. This narrative is appealing—for example, “Newton developed the concept of gravity around 1666, when an apple fell on his head while he was meditating under an apple tree.” The truth is that by 1666, Newton had already spent many years teaching himself the mathematics of his time (Euclidean geometry, algebra, Cartesian coordinates) and inventing calculus so that he could measure planetary orbits and the area under a curve. He continued to work on his theory of gravity over the subsequent years, completing the effort only in 1687, when he published Philosophiœ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In other words, Newton’s formulation of the concept of gravity took more than 20 years and included multiple components: preparation, incubation, inspiration—a version of the eureka experience—and production. Many forms of creativity, from writing a novel to discovering the structure of DNA, require this kind of ongoing, iterative process.

- Many creative people are autodidacts. They like to teach themselves, rather than be spoon-fed information or knowledge in standard educational settings. Famously, three Silicon Valley creative geniuses have been college dropouts: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.

- Many creative people are polymaths, as historic geniuses including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were.
The arts and the sciences are seen as separate tracks, and students are encouraged to specialize in one or the other. If we wish to nurture creative students, this may be a serious error.

- Creative people tend to be very persistent, even when confronted with skepticism or rejection.

- Do creative people simply have more ideas, and therefore differ from average people only in a quantitative way, or are they also qualitatively different? One subject, a neuroscientist and an inventor, addressed this question in an interesting way, conceptualizing the matter in terms of kites and strings:

In the R&D business, we kind of lump people into two categories: inventors and engineers. The inventor is the kite kind of person. They have a zillion ideas and they come up with great first prototypes. But generally an inventor … is not a tidy person. He sees the big picture and … [is] constantly lashing something together that doesn’t really work. And then the engineers are the strings, the craftsmen [who pick out a good idea] and make it really practical. So, one is about a good idea, the other is about … making it practical.

An excellent education idea from France!

This is a programmer's equivalent of wilderness survival challenge or a tech incubator on steroids:

The basic idea of École 42 is to throw all the students — 800 to 1,000 per year — into a single building in the heart of Paris, give them Macs with big Cinema displays, and throw increasingly difficult programming challenges at them. The students are given little direction about how to solve the problems, so they have to turn to each other — and to the Internet — to figure out the solutions.

Yet École 42 is harder to get into than Harvard: Last year, 70,000 people attempted the online qualification test. 20,000 completed the test, and of those, 4,000 were invited to spend four weeks in Paris doing an intensive project that had them working upwards of 100 hours a week on various coding challenges. In the end, 890 students were selected for the school’s inaugural class, which began in November, 2013.

The most valuable resource in today's technology world is highly motivated, skilled people. The new school may set a good example for discovering and creating peak performers, both individuals and (more importantly!) teams.

MOOCs: what can we learn from baseball scouts?

It turns out that one of the biggest problems with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) is low completion rate. Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, decided to "pivot" away from MOOCs because on average only 4 percent of participants completed courses offered by his company. Although the courses reach hundreds of thousands of people, the end result is nowhere near inflated expectations about a revolution in education.

Motivation to learn seems to be the key to succeed online. I think MOOCs will become an effective tool for finding talented and motivated individuals, rather than educating masses around the world. Ideally, MOOCs should replace rote tests like SATs because to a prospective educator and/or employer a successfully completed online course provides a strong indicator of the student's intellectual and social skills, especially when creativity and entrepreneurship are required.

From this perspective, I find Nate Silver's chapter (The Signal and the Noise. 2013) about baseball scouting particularly insightful. Here's a list of five abilities that predict success at the major-league level:

1. Preparedness and Work Ethic. Baseball is unlike almost all other professional sports in that games are played six or seven times a week. A baseball player has to be ready to perform at a professional level every day.
2. Concentration and Focus. this category specifically concerns the manner in which a player conducts himself during the course of the game.
3. Competitiveness and Self-Confidence. “Is there a desire to succeed to the degree that there’s a failure mechanism kicking in? Is there a fear of failure? Is the desire to succeed significant enough to overcome the fear of failure?”
4. Stress Management and Humility. In baseball even the best hitters fail a majority of the time. The ability to cope with this failure requires a short memory and a certain sense of humor.
5. Adaptiveness and Learning Ability. How successfully is the player able to process new information during a game? Listen to advice from his coaches? How does he adapt when his life situation changes?

I wonder if we can create scouting reports on entrepreneurs, e.g. by using Angel List or other new social media tools. Like major league baseball, innovation and entrepreneurship is a high-stake game played every day. Creating a winning team is one of the most important tasks for a startup CEO and people who fund his/her company.


tags: innovation, education, detection, control, synthesis, system

Cognitive vs Noncognitive skills: employment impact

A brief quote from an NBER paper:

.. we find that noncognitive ability has a higher return than cognitive ability for unskilled workers and managers while skilled workers and non-managerial positions face a higher return on cognitive than to noncognitive ability.

Noncognitive traits are common to successful highly-paid managers and low-paid workers. This might explain a certain disdain highly-paid engineers show toward marketing and manager types.

tags: education, psychology, economics

Misguided policies: Education, Skills, and Creativity.

Many economists and educators dismiss as odd cases when college dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and others create incredibly successful businesses.

Nevertheless, a theory that accounts for the difference between education and skills would explain such successes. In fact, it appears that economists deliberately substitute education for skill because they can't measure the latter. Here's what Prof. Martha L. Olney says in her UC Berkeley lectures on US Economic History.

We can't measure (easily) skill, but we can measure educational attainment. [UC Berkeley. Economics 113, Spring 2013, Lecture 26. 8m 25s].

You can see from her slide that to improve the competitiveness of the US workers we need them to develop new skills (bullet 2), but since they cannot measure skill, economists advise for more education (bullet 3). That's how we get huge inflation in the education system.

How do things work out in education? Below are the results of a Gallup poll about skill attainment through education. The poll shows that the gap between education and real-life problem-solving skills gets closed substantially (65%) only by the time one gets a post graduate degree.

Such gap in skills would explain the growing income gap between top and bottom earners.

To summarize, while the US spends massively on education, its workforce remains non-competitive because our policies deliberately confuse education with skills. By contrast, Germany spends a lot of effort in developing skilled workers, who remain globally competitive despite their high wages.

A similar process takes place in creativity-related education. If students don't develop skills, they remain stuck in the left side of the skill-challenge space and, unlike Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, can't take on important challenges.

tags: education, creativity, system, control

Lunch Talk: (@TED) Teaching surgeons around the world.

Laparoscopic surgery uses minimally invasive incisions -- which means less pain and shorter recovery times for patients. But Steven Schwaitzberg has run into two problems teaching these techniques to surgeons around the world -- language and distance. He shares how a new technology, which combines video conferencing and a real-time universal translator, could help.

Youtube link.

tags: education, lunchtalk, health, system, distribution, video

Lunch Talk: (@Google) Transforming Education in the 21st century.

The Change Leadership Group at the Harvard School of Education has, through its work with educators, developed a thoughtful approach to the transformation of schools in the face of increasing demands for accountability. This book brings the work of the Change Leadership Group to a broader audience, providing a framework to analyze the work of school change and exercises that guide educators through the development of their practice as agents of change. It exemplifies a new and powerful approach to leadership in schools.

About Tony: Tony Wagner recently accepted a position as the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. Prior to this, he was the founder and co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for more than a decade.

tags: lunchtalk, education, innovation

Lunch Talk: BBC - The Human Mind (Part 1)

Part 1 of a BBC documentary about "restructuring" one's brain, i.e. learning.

Link

tags: brain, lunchtalk, education

Robots vs People, China edition.

(MIT Tech Review. July 16, 2012). Migrant Workers in China Face Competition from Robots. 

 Foxconn's Longhua factory complex, where Apple products are assembled. Most spend their days seated beside a conveyer belt, wearing white gowns, face masks, and hairnets so that stray hairs and specks of dust won't interfere as they perform simple but precise tasks, again and again. Each worker focuses on a single action, like putting stickers on the front of an iPhone or packing a finished product into a box. As managers told ABC's Nightline, which aired a rare look inside the factory in February, it takes five days and 325 steps to assemble an iPad.

Even assuming competition from nimble-fingered humans putting in 12-hour shifts, a single robot might replace two workers, and possibly as many as four.

If people's homes were less messy, robots would replace us in doing house chores. What is it that makes home environment so unstructured, compared to factory environment? Is it the children?

tags: control, tool, education, technology

Lunch Talk: TED - Peter Norvig: The 100,000-student classroom.

In the fall of 2011 Peter Norvig taught a class with Sebastian Thrun on artificial intelligence at Stanford attended by 175 students in situ -- and over 100,000 via an interactive webcast. He shares what he learned about teaching to a global classroom.

 Link

tags: lunchtalk, innovation, education

Brain training: Nature and Nurture

College-level hockey players can now improve their game performance by using technology originally developed for fighter pilots:

March 18, 2012. NHL.com -- "We were asking coaches how they train athletes to make the right decisions," said Danny Dankner, ACE's chief operating officer. "For many of them, they thought being a smart player was a born trait. Either you were born that way or not. But, just like training your muscles, everyone can train their brain fundamentals. The percentage of improvement for pilots in on-air performance was tens of percent on average. If you want to train situational alertness and read-and-react skills and pattern recognition, these are skills that are harder to train."

While other schools, including the United States Air Force Academy, have adopted IntelliGym in their hockey programs, the greatest results so far have been with the United States' National Development Team Program. In perhaps the greatest testament to the merits of the program, last summer's draft boasted an impressive 16 selections who had trained with the IntelliGym.

 tags: creativity, education, control

Lunchtalk: (@Stanford) Design thinking in business.

In this webinar, learn techniques and processes that not only foster innovation, but also measure the impacts on the bottom line.

link


tags: lunchtalk, innovation, education

LunchTalk: (TED) The myths about "third-world"

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."

link

tags: lunchtalk, education, trend

Demographics of entrepreneurship in the US.

A new study (see NBER paper) shows that successful American entrepreneurs are significantly older than anecdotal evidence tends to suggest.

Feb 1, 2012. MTR -- the average and median age of the founders of successful U.S. technology businesses (with real revenues) is 39. We found twice as many successful founders over 50 as under 25, and twice as many over 60 as under 20.

  

Kellogg School of Management economist Benjamin F. Jones looked at the backgrounds of Nobel Prize winners and other great inventors of the 20th century. He found that the average age at which they made their greatest innovations was 39. The largest mass of great advances -- 72 percent -- came in an inventor's 30s and 40s, and only 7 percent came before the age of 26.

Should we be spending more time and resources on post-college entrepreneurship education?

tags: education, innovation, problem, solution, technology


 

Lunchtalk: Building your own human capital (@Google)

The richest billionaire executive on the planet and the lowest-status minimum-wage worker have at least one thing in common when it comes to work: they both have 24 hours in the day. So what distinguishes the high-earning executive from lower-paid workers? It's the amount of capital they are able to combine with that 24 hours each day. Not just capital in the form of money and business systems, but also the amount of intangible "human capital" they bring to their work: knowledge, wisdom gained from experience, mindset, the ability to sell their vision effectively to others, and the "social capital" of their business connections. 

tags: lunchtalk, education, social, investment

Online video – learning 24/7

Broadband creates new opportunities in the service economy. Music lessons are going virtual on Skype.

January 10, 2012. NYT -- Skype and other videochat programs have transformed the simple phone call, but the technology is venturing into a new frontier: it is upending and democratizing the world of music lessons.


Students who used to limit the pool of potential teachers to those within a 20-mile radius from their homes now take lessons from teachers — some with world-class credentials — on other coasts or continents.

Parents are also driving the shift to webcam music lessons. After Susan Patterson grew tired of taking her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, 45 minutes each way for violin lessons, she e-mailed 15 violin teachers with Web sites.

What e-Bay did for physical goods, social video is going to do to services, including education.

¡Touchdown 49ers!

tags: commerce, service, social, distribution, business, information, education