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Comment by nobody3141592 | Hacker News Reader

The secret is to make high school a lot HARDER. Not wanting to do a 'when I was young rant' but I learned the calculus at age 15-16 US grade 9-10. Then in our 'senior' high schools we only studied core subjects eg. maths+physics

Now I lecture to physics undergrads who have never been taught calculus. So not only do we have to teach them intro maths techniques but they have never really studied physics - they have been shown fun and interesting demonstrations and given a simple hand-waving 'explanation' - but without being able to follow the maths you can't explain it.

I'm sorry but the answer to fixing the science and engineering problem isn't more fun science games in high school, or pretty computer demos of experiments - it's concentrating on lots of hard boring maths earlier and earlier.

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Why on earth would you want to make something HARDER when faced with a large group of people who already think it's too hard or non-relevant? It's not a weed-out contest.

I have an undergrad degree in EE. If someone could find a way to make today's undergrads learn the same material, but have a much easier time of it, why would anyone oppose that? Do I really need to feel bitter because I struggled but a whole new bunch of kids breeze through the material?

Sure, we don't want to waste time, but if the "fun science games" can lead to better understanding of the math behind it so much the better. I once used a weight hanging on a long string held up to my nose as an explanation of conservation of energy: "bet that this weight won't hit me in the face when I let it swing out and back?" "Why didn't it hit me?" "What can I change so it will smack me in the face?"

It's a "game," but they did learn something useful from it.

If the problem is that large number of students enter STEM but drop out because they aren't equipped - then you have to prepare them better.

Two options - one is to make STEM degrees 6 or 8 years and teach 2-4 years of what should be high school physics at the start.

The other is to spend the time in high school teaching them the 'hard' stuff - when they don't have the option to drop out - rather than trying to 'interest them in science' by showing them only pretty/fun things.

Math is to brain what lifting weights is to muscles. We teach math not because of some useful skills but to increase brain capacity. For the same reason languages used to be taught in the past. As same as with weight lifting it has to be hard to get results otherwise it's a waste of time.

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