In my previous post I mentioned a bit about the first course I completed for my OSS 1.5 year challenge. This marks course 1/30 (recall I skipped the first course, reducing the total down from 31) that I have completed. This post will focus briefly on my experience with this course, and whether I think it's worth completing.
Effective Thinking Through Mathematics is taught by Michael Starbird at the University of Texas at Austin. The course is delivered though EdX and is designed to take 5 weeks. I set the video player to 1.5x speed and plowed through this course in about 8-12 hours. I'll try to get better at tracking my time in the future, but it is what it is at this point.
The course opens with a puzzle called the Meanie Genie, and it's pretty good. I don't want to spoil anything by telling you how I solved it, but I'll tell you that the essence of the puzzle is to teach you to examine all the possibilities when you're faced with a problem, and to convince you of the importance of following through with your ideas. The problem (in short form) is this:
Suppose you have 9 identical looking stones, one of which contains a valuable gem that adds a slight amount of weight to the stone. You have a balance scale, and it can only be used twice. You must answer, is it possible to find the stone containing the gem in only two attempts or not. If it is possible, what can you do to find the stone?
I presented this puzzle to my 12 year old niece at Christmas this year and she wasn't into it. Surprisingly my sister was captivated, but was really frustrated that she couldn't solve it right away.
"Obviously there has to be a way to solve it or you wouldn't be asking the question in the first place", she said.
"Well... yea... you caught me", I replied. But I refused tell her how to solve it.
She did eventually solve the problem, but it was really interesting to see her struggle with the puzzle in a very similar way that Scott (the student helper) did in the videos. She became really frustrated, as many of us do when we struggle to work through a problem, but I nudged her to keep thinking. Stealing techniques from professor Starbird, I got her to consider all the possibilities and forced her to follow through with each trial until she found the answer and it became so painfully obvious.
As professor Starbird says, the easy way is the easy way because you've solved the problem or similar problems and understand them at a level which makes them now seem easy. It's easy for a Major League Baseball pitcher to throw a strike down the middle of the plate, not because they are gifted (though they may be), but because they've practiced this challenge so much that it's no longer hard to do.
I really enjoyed the course, there were lots of puzzles that I forced myself to work though, and I gained a lot of insight into how I can approach future problems I find challenging. I learned something interesting about the concept of infinity and that there different size sets of infinity... in fact I learned there are an infinite number of sets of infinitely long sequences, really mind blowing stuff.
I felt the course was a great primer for the OSS curriculum, and I'm excited to tackle the next course, starting tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment