Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

See: Section "Exam".

The only thing that matters is that students aim towards the goals described at explain how to make money with the lesson.

Any "homework for which the student cannot use existing resources available online" is a waste of time.

The ideal way to go about it is to reach some intermediate milestone, and then document it. You don't have to do the hole thing! Just go until your patience with it runs out. But while you are doing it, go as deep and wide as you possibly can, without mercy.

This is actually how Ciro Santilli learns new subjects he is curious about, even as an adult! Some examples:

The Moonshots in Education project also has a fantastic related quote:

People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.

Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.

Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.

Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.

This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.

Give students answers to all questions.

Explain in extreme detail how each result was reached.

Students have the amazing capacity of not looking at answers if they don't want to.

And when they've had enough, then can read answers and understand while the problem is fresh in their minds.

If you don't give answers, no one will be able to use your online material without you being there to hold their hands.

Forbidding students from publishing their answers also goes against let students learn by teaching.

Grouping by age as done in traditional education as of 2020 is useless.

Rather, we should group students by subject of interest; e.g. natural sciences, social sciences, a sport, etc., just like in any working adult organization!

This way, younger students can actually actively learn from and collaborate with older students about, see notably Jacques Monod's you can learn more from older students than from faculty.

This becomes even more natural when you try to give students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.

This age distinction should be abolished at all stages of the system, not only within K-12, but also across K-12, undergraduate education and postgraduate education.

This idea is part of the ideal that the learning environment should be more like a dojo environment (AKA peer tutoring, see also dojo learning model), rather than an amorphous checkbox ticking exercise in bureaucracy so that "everyone is educated".

Perhaps, even more importantly, is that we should put much more emphasis on grouping students with other students online, where we can select similar interest amongst the entire population and not just on a per-local-neighbourhood basis.

This is the most important of all points.

Don't set goals for your students.

Ask students what they want to do, and help them achieve that goal.

If they don't know what to do, give suggestions of interesting things they could do.

Once they have a goal, just help them learn everything that is needed to achieve that goal

If they don't have a goal, any attempt to learn is a total and complete waste of time.

This is because the universe of potentially useful things that can be learnt is infinite, and no human can ever learn everything.

The only solution, is to try and learn only what seems necessary to reach your goal, and just try to reach your goal instead.

This approach is called backward design.

Also, setting overly ambitious goals, is a good idea: the side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved.

"Graduating" and "getting a diploma" are not valid goals, because they are useless. A goal has to be either an amazing specific technological or artistic development.

Tell students to:

Praise those that do this very highly, and give them better grades if you have that superpower.

This is part of a larger concept Ciro Santilli holds dear: don't just consume, but also produce.

Whatever you do, even if it is playing video games: if you manage to produce related content that will interest other people, and possibly allow you to get paid, it will much much fun to do that thing.

Then, if people find errors, or have questions, they will write a comment near the content itself.

Then, next person that comes along and has the same problem, will also find that comment, and your answer will solve their problems too.

The perfect way to do this is to use GitHub issues

Just make it very clear what you've tried, what you observed, and what you don't understand if anything at all.

This will already open up room for others to come and expand on your attempt, and you are more likely to learn the answers to your questions as they do.

And there's a good chance someone who knows more than you will come along and correct or teach you something new about the subject. For example, this has happened countless times to Ciro Santilli when doing Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

See also: there is value in tutorials written by beginners.

Examples of famous fails:

The thing about projects is that they are illiquid: it is not easy to immediately compare them.

And that is the whole point.

The outcome of that however is that you have to learn how to explain what you've achieved to others and why it is awesome.

Just like in the real world.

You have to create portfolio, and do some public relations.

When you do get face to face time with students, don't teach a large group.

Everything you want to teach is already online.

And if it is not, then you are wasting your time saying it face-to-face instead of creating such online resource.

The only goal of meeting students is talking to them individually or in small groups to:

and letting them do the same amongst themselves.

If you talk to a large group, you will only reach / understand a very small percentage of the group, so your time is wasted.

It is better to deeply understand what 25% of the students feel and adapt the course material, than to talk to everyone at once, and have only 5% understand anything.

Text materials are generally superior to video because they:

Only produce video material if:

Never create videos of people just speaking hardcore content for long amounts of time.

If you have to use videos, make them as short as possible, and index them with a textual table of contents.

Also consider using sequences of images or GIFs instead of videos, since those are cheaper.

By writing in English you reach more people.

Writing in any other language is a waste of time.

The reason is simple: English speakers control a huge proportion of the world's GDP.

English is the de-facto Lingua Franca of the second half of the 20th Century, it is the new lingua franca, the new Latin, and there is no escaping it.

Students who don't know English will never do anything truly useful in science and technology. So it is pointless to teach them anything (besides English itself).

See also: having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

Whenever you make a change to your material, people should still be able to access the previous version.

Maybe there was something in the previous version that they needed, and you just removed.

Git + GitHub is the perfect way to do versioning.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Footnotes#Footnotes:_using_a_source_more_than_once gives the following method:

Definition, anywhere on article, likely ideally as the first usage:

And then you can use it later on as:which automatically expands the exact same thing, or using the shortcut:

To cite multiple pages of a book: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Citing_multiple_pages_of_the_same_source, the best method is to define and use the reference without adding the p or location in cite as:Do not set the page in cite, otherwise it shows up on the references. Instead we use the {{rp}} template. And then use the reference with the {{r}} template as:or for multiple pages:

TODO:

Ciro Santilli often sees all those genius who are much smarter than him making shitty forum/mailing list posts, they need to learn this:

Examples:

Allows us to draw with JavaScript pixel by pixel! Great way to create computational physics demos!

Here is an animation demo with some useful controls:

new class extends OurbigbookCanvasDemo {
  init() {
    super.init('hello');
    this.pixel_size_input = this.addInputAfterEnable(
      'Pixel size',
      {
        'min': 1,
        'type': 'number',
        'value': 1,
      }
    );
  }
  draw() {
    var pixel_size = parseInt(this.pixel_size_input.value);
    for (var x = 0; x < this.width; x += pixel_size) {
      for (var y = 0; y < this.height; y += pixel_size) {
        var b = ((1.0 + Math.sin(this.time * Math.PI / 16)) / 2.0);
        this.ctx.fillStyle =
          'rgba(' +
          (x / this.width) * 255 + ',' +
          (y / this.height) * 255 + ',' +
          b * 255 +
          ',255)'
        ;
        this.ctx.fillRect(x, y, pixel_size, pixel_size);
      }
    }
  }
}

Bibliography: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Tutorial/Basic_animations">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Tutorial/Basic_animations