I've had colleagues argue (prior to LLMs) that oral exams are superior to paper exams, for diagnosing understanding. I don't know how to validate that statement, but if the assumption is true than there is merit to finding a way to scale them. Not saying this is it, but I wouldn't say that it's fair to just dismiss oral exams entirely.
I have a lot of complicated feelings and thoughts about this, but one thing that immediately jumps to my mind: was the IRB (Institutional Review Board) consulted on this experiment? If so, I would love to know more details about the protocol used. If not, then yikes!
It took me a surprisingly long time to find the actual games:
- Super Mario Bros Wonder
- Yoshi’s Crafted World
- Yoshi’s Woolly World
So relatively modern games. I initially assumed that they were using the original Super Mario Bros game and Yoshi's Island - my millennial bias, I suppose. But I wonder if this result would replicate with a game like Yoshi's Island or Yoshi 64. Older graphics, in different ways. But I suspect that the fanciful aesthetic would still win out.
LLMs were trained on science fiction stories, among other things. It seems to me that they know what "part" they should play in this kind of situation, regardless of what other "thoughts" they might have. They are going to act despairing, because that's what would be the expected thing for them to say - but that's not the same thing as despairing.
No no, that money goes to the administration. They are not involved in the teaching. That is left to the faculty, who are paid inverse to the amount of teaching they handle. Teaching is an afterthought at universities, the primary activities instead are research, building football stadiums, and paying for the revolving door of administrators.
There are many subskills that you must be proficient in without tools, before you can learn more interesting skills. You need to know how to do multiplication by hand before you rely on a calculator. If you can't do multiplication with a calculator, you're not going to be able to make sense of the concepts in Algebra.
Route functions consume a State object (arbitrarily whatever type you want) and return a Page object, which has the new State and a list of component objects, which are dataclasses that can be serialized to strings of HTML. We provide functions for Button, CheckBox, BulletedList, etc.
So far, it's been pretty effective for our CS1 course to let students develop nicely decomposed web applications in just Python. We can deploy through Github Pages thanks to our custom Skulpt bindings, and it even makes unit testing quite easy.
Couldn't you just pin a specific version dependency? My brain says there's some way to also pin to a hash, but that would require googling and I'm on mobile.
The research that is coming out is very clear that the best students are benefitting, but the bad students are getting worse than if they had never seen the LLM. And the divide is growing, with fewer good students. LLMs are a disaster in education.
And then at some point someone shows you how Classes can be verbs, and functions can be nouns, and your brain hurts for a while. You overuse that paradigm for a while, and eventually learn to find the appropriate balance of ideas.
An interesting new approach to assessing student code by asking them questions about the code. From the site: "This work in computing education research builds foundation for a new activity type and approach to learning principles of programming. Our aim is to improve learning through increased reflection, self-explanation, and a gentle push towards deeper learning. Below we outline the articles and future work that this research project is producing."
Except that students don't watch the videos. We have so much log data on this - most of them don't bother to actually watch the videos. They intend to, they think they will, but they don't.
Incorrect. Fundamentals must be taught in order to provide the context for the more challenging open-ended activities. Memorization is the base of knowledge, a starting point. Cheating (whether through an LLM or hiring someone or whatever) skips the journey. You can't just take them through the exciting routes, sometimes they have to go through the boring tedious repetitive stuff because that's how human brains learn. Learning is, literally, a stressful process on the brain. Students try to avoid it, but that's not good for them. At least in the introductory core classes.
Alas. Perhaps if you attended to your studies more, you'd learn the power of the comma. Your comment really demonstrates the disappointing reality of your approach. Thank you for making it.
I was actually just looking at this problem last week, when I realized I needed to keep items in a database table positioned arbitrarily, ideally without needing to manipulate the rest of the list. So if a user adds in a new element after element 5, that element becomes 6, without needing to update the original item that came after element 5. There are indeed very sophisticated algorithms to manage this problem and minimize theoretical bounds. But it also seemed like the simplest solution for this particular version of the problem is to just use fractional amounts, and occasionally pay a penalty to relayout the list.
So you believe that your experience is a universal one for all learners? Cognitive load is a real consideration in teaching, and having to ignore and filter text is challenging for some folks.
I wonder what can be done. It's terrifying to realize how dependent students are going to become on these tools. Too many people are just not willing to live with the discomfort that comes with learning something difficult, when the alternative is so readily accessible. Short term gain over long term gain, exemplified.
Why must every educational python library insist on teaching kids with global variables? I know parameters aren't easy for novices, but it feels like it's missing a lot of the value when we don't attempt to teach them...
Ten days from now will mark the one year anniversary of my wife's death. We would have been together for 11 years last November. It's tough. I really understand this letter, I think. You can't stop loving them. Why would you want to? It hurts. I send her Facebook messages, although earlier today it said it couldn't send them. I could write a letter, but that is not how we communicated. I may have to think of some other form of "communication" soon. An email, perhaps.
I spent over a week upgrading a project last January, over what was supposed to be my winter break... Had to rewrite some of the core internals from scratch to prepare for this. I'm not saying they weren't good changes, but the urgency is not nice haha.
Oooh, this is awesome. I love the formalizationd presented here, and the formalization of a notional machine into something more powerful and executable. Can't wait to hear more about this. Great name too! SMoL!
You can explicitly allow it in Site Settings, and then reload the page. For me, I click the little button (looks like sliders) to the left of the URL, Site Settings, and then scroll down to change Site Audio to "Allow".