When I was in school (BS Computer Engineering, Univeristy of Illinois) I noticed the same thing - this is an old story for me. the kids who took Calculus using the university's Mathematica based classes couldn't remember how to do simple derivatives when it was all over.
Essentially, the instructors believed that the software was going to relieve them of having to actually teach, where really it should have just been an additional tool.
There is no substitute for the interactive learning between a student and a teacher. Relying on "interactive software" is akin to giving students the textbook and telling them to teach themselves. Unfortunatly, I see "distance learning" and things of that nature growing in importance - widening the gap between student and mentor.
People are still people. Once we learn that computer technology isn't going to change the way that we think and learn, we'll all be better off.
You'll never hear someone say "I became an engineer because MathBlaster 3.0 taught me to have a passion for physics and the scientific process". There is more to learning than getting the facts right.
I am a graduate of the University of Illinois (Computer Engineering). The school had a pilot program of using Mathematica (developed in town- yes that's a throw down) to teach first year calculus. I didn't do it that way, I used a book, paper, chalkboard, and a professor. But I watched my roommate and several others I knew go through the course using the computer based course exclusively and simply learned very very little about basic calculus. They did the course on the computer, but took the regular exams on paper. By the end of the year he was still pausing on something like d/dx (x^2) (He eventually switched out of engineering altogether, by the way). These sorts of computer based tools are great, and particularly useful in many situations. But, having seen the results at my school, with the calculus class among others, they are terrible learning tools.
As a recommendation to aspiring engineers, there's simply no substitute for the basic classroom environment, learning from a book, and understanding what you're doing, rather than having the computer figure it out for you.
Open source development has one primary and awesome strength- creating stable, reliable programming. This process is slow, but that's the trade-off for stability. It's extremely useful for software that needs to be done once, right, and will be around for a long time. Things like operating systems, programming tools, server systems (email, web) and fundamental office systems, like word processing.
Games do not need this strength. They need to be quick to development and often have a short lifetime. If there's a bug in a game release for, say, playstation, you're not going to take the time to release an updated version of the game. We'll all have moved on by then. So why would you go through the effort to run it through the open source mill? You're just wasting your time.
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When I was in school (BS Computer Engineering, Univeristy of Illinois) I noticed the same thing - this is an old story for me. the kids who took Calculus using the university's Mathematica based classes couldn't remember how to do simple derivatives when it was all over.
Essentially, the instructors believed that the software was going to relieve them of having to actually teach, where really it should have just been an additional tool.
There is no substitute for the interactive learning between a student and a teacher. Relying on "interactive software" is akin to giving students the textbook and telling them to teach themselves. Unfortunatly, I see "distance learning" and things of that nature growing in importance - widening the gap between student and mentor.
People are still people. Once we learn that computer technology isn't going to change the way that we think and learn, we'll all be better off.
You'll never hear someone say "I became an engineer because MathBlaster 3.0 taught me to have a passion for physics and the scientific process". There is more to learning than getting the facts right.
I am a graduate of the University of Illinois (Computer Engineering). The school had a pilot program of using Mathematica (developed in town- yes that's a throw down) to teach first year calculus. I didn't do it that way, I used a book, paper, chalkboard, and a professor. But I watched my roommate and several others I knew go through the course using the computer based course exclusively and simply learned very very little about basic calculus. They did the course on the computer, but took the regular exams on paper. By the end of the year he was still pausing on something like d/dx (x^2) (He eventually switched out of engineering altogether, by the way). These sorts of computer based tools are great, and particularly useful in many situations. But, having seen the results at my school, with the calculus class among others, they are terrible learning tools.
As a recommendation to aspiring engineers, there's simply no substitute for the basic classroom environment, learning from a book, and understanding what you're doing, rather than having the computer figure it out for you.
Open source development has one primary and awesome strength- creating stable, reliable programming. This process is slow, but that's the trade-off for stability. It's extremely useful for software that needs to be done once, right, and will be around for a long time. Things like operating systems, programming tools, server systems (email, web) and fundamental office systems, like word processing.
Games do not need this strength. They need to be quick to development and often have a short lifetime. If there's a bug in a game release for, say, playstation, you're not going to take the time to release an updated version of the game. We'll all have moved on by then. So why would you go through the effort to run it through the open source mill? You're just wasting your time.