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Comment by RiderOfGiraffes | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced this is actually a good idea ...

  > I stopped using PowerPoint slides.

There's a great start.

  > immediately pose a programming puzzle using this concept to the class

Instant reinforcement of the ideas

  > ask students to work on the problem for 5-10 minutes

Enough time to get into the issues concerned, not enough time to get stuck and frustrated

  > volunteers to present their solution by writing it on the whiteboard.

Present your work to others for everyone to learn.

  > discuss and correct the presented solutions from
  > the perspective of a potential interviewer

Immediate feedback for everyone, further analysis of the problem and the ideas involved.

It won't suit everyone, but ...

  > Will I teach all the remaining technical material
  > in the course using this method? Of course not.

I wonder which method will prove more effective.

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I have had some classes that employed a similar method, it works in some cases (small class size, professor and students are very familiar/good rapport) but in general this is how it would go in my experience:

- Students group up for 5-10min to work together, everyone sits there and waits for the one person who knows the solution to solve it

- Prof asks for a group to come up, no groups volunteer so he starts picking at random

- Students that don't know the answers will stop showing up for lecture or will cling to the people that do, so they don't learn the material

Like I said, there are cases when it can work -- and when it does it makes for a really good lecture. But I find it is increasing rare that students are willing to go up to the professor and in front of their classmates and work through their mistakes; you are very exposed and I think the fear of public failure can be overwhelming.

PBL can be very powerful in the right setting, but as you point out, it really boils down to student/professor rapport. In the best case, PBL is a fantastic learning tool, but in the worst case, as you say, it can be incredibly divisive.

What is PBL? I'm guessing "problem-based learning"?

yes, sorry - i spent the better part of a year studying that in depth and got rather used to using the acronym :)

One way to approach this is for the teacher to model getting to an eventual solution including mistakes and false starts. This gets the students comfortable with the idea that they don't have to know everything when starting or having to present a perfect solution and that the real learning comes with some struggle to get to the solution.

I just graduated from the department Eli teaches in, and I know him personally. Out of curiosity, how did you stumble on this?

I have no idea. I do a lot of searching, some computer assisted, some directed by Bayesian filters, some directed by keyword search, and some just clicking around. I spend about 2 hours a day on searching about math, teaching, hacking, programming, physics, enrichment, and similar. I also employ programmers, and am interested in the problems of interviewing. I guess in that 2 hours I view about 700 or 800 pages, most for just a couple of seconds. I then save around 20 that my systems have marked as potentially interesting.

I found it in the bundle.

I like Eli too, he's pretty good at dry humor. I know him from the georgia tech days.

This is a good way of teaching in general - presenting a problem, having students work at it (alone or in groups), then everyone discussing solutions. This is class time well spent, much more effective than lectures. Students being becoming interviewees is just one side effect.

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