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Comment by diebeforei485 | Hacker News Reader

This class is great because it introduces a lot of concepts but most importantly really sharpens your problem-solving skills.

> The method we tend to use in 251 is throwing you deep into the water without a paddle (i.e., giving you very basic definitions for a new topic you haven't seen and expecting you to solve things that you might be given in a course dedicated to that topic in say the third week). We do this over and over, pretty much starting from scratch on a new topic every week. As a result, it can be very frustrating—which, of course, is the intention. If you're constantly trying to solve things that are just outside of your reach, you develop better strategies for thinking about problems you're given.

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I'm not sure I necessarily agree with this strategy. In my CS undergrad, I had an algorithms class where the professor did this and expected the students to be able to do homework assignments each week that were worth a significant portion of our grade with basically no explanation on how to solve these extremely complicated optimization problems. When comparing our assignments to that of another student taking the same class with a different professor, theirs were much, much easier.

I dont think this teaching methodology made me gain any more from the course, if anything, it made me gain less because I constantly had the stress of trying to do these ridiculous problems on top of all of my other work every week

Maybe I'm not reading that correctly, but it seems like you were able to do more difficult assignments than the students in the other class.

For algorithms, sure. For this class, it had worked great when I took it 20 years ago. The class didn’t expect us to solve the problems, just understand them enough to apply them in our daily thinking for software.

Yeah, whenever we had this issue in a class, we just ended up focussing on doing WHATEVER IT TOOK wink wink to pass.

Honestly, this just sounds like a terrible way to teach.

this is my favourite way to learn

If the problems are interesting, why not. If they are not and they are purely abstract without purpose, I might not feel motivated at all.

Honestly, for a long time this was the standard way of learning in academia. Lecturers gave lectures and everything else was on the students to find out (from books).

Right now we reached the other end of the pendulum swing, where everything is hand-fed to the students.

I disagree. Doing my math degree I had constantly sat in classes where I had no idea what I was being taught. Doing my own research helped me understand the topic a lot better.

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