Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

I looked at the example for computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in food. Explanations include:

"a list can be used for a recipe"

"a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals"

"a map can be used for a cookbook"

"a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen"

"a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together"

Maybe I'm over-estimating the taste of 7th graders, but I feel like I would get sick of this really quickly.

I'm sure computer science has improved in high school over the last (gulp) 20 years, but when I did variations of IT and programming lessons before university, it was bad. This was peak "you must Microsoft Office"-era. I've been involved in outreach for almost as long at this point. A lot of kids ask sensible questions like 'when do I ever need to use trig in real life?', because the examples in lessons and exams are so divorced from reality that it feels pointless.

I do think there is pedagogical value in showing where these concepts can be used practically and the advantage of LLMs is that you can transform the examples to what you're actually interested in. For example the Red Blob Games series on A* pathfinding are really good at showing how Dijkstra and graph traversal algorithms work, for a use-case (video games) that is appealing to a lot of nerdy people.

"When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting.

But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% sure I will need in my day-to-day life" is a sensible question, when it really isn't.

Outside of my 2-year stint in the game development industry, I never really needed most of what I learned about trigonometry in my day-to-day life. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful.

Yes, we should make the subject matter more approachable to kids, but we should also try to shift the paradigm so that kids are more open to learning new things.

If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.

> If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back?

Agreed.

> I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.

Disagree. The justification for why they should learn $FOO may never be understood by a mind that we are teaching $FOO to.

There's good justification for learning to read, but not one that would be understood by a 6 year old.

There's similarly good justification for teaching Maths, but you'd be hard pressed to convince a 16 year old of the value in practicing abstract reasoning, using Maths as the vehicle.

Sometimes, the only good answer to give a kid is "you'll see the value when you're older".

And the problem with that answer is that it doesn't lead to engagement or interest and that means it doesn't lead to learning. It's a bad answer.

I also disagree that there needs to be justification. I don't think students' minds work like that. What's needed is something different and probably many kinds of something different since there's many kinds of learners.

So far, a huge percentage of students are getting left behind when teachers and material fail to have a good answer.