Computers and Education

ZRH

ZRH

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Mar 5, 2005
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Computers and Math

I was going through my books the other day and found a drafting textbook of my dad's. Now I'm not that old but my parents are slightly older than the average for my generation, so this book was used at RIT in the late 1960s. Drafting, if some of you don't know, is the common word for technical drawing on paper, or what is normally done with CAD programs now. Now this textbook is hefty, think multi variable calculus or European history hefty. 970 pages, 1000~ish exercises. All on how to lay out and draw things in a rigidly designed system of scale and projection. Art drawing, it is not.

The tools are fairly simple, although there are some that are obviously there for speed you could get by or at least construct the more complicated ones with just divider, a compass and straight edge. There are of course many different types of marking instruments but pencils are about universal. After technical drawing was mastered it continued on into descriptive geometry. That is the set of rules and practice of laying out 3 dimensional objects on a 2 dimensional piece of paper. It seems to have a massive problem solving system built in as well.

These things, aside from the practical value of forcing you to always be solving problems, also enable one to construct the entire set of tools needed to use them from the tools needed to practice them. I forget the word for this, but you know, if civilization ended you wouldn't be totally screwed.

Now, we have computer algebra, CAD, um... other things?

I doubt most people could find roots by hand. Navigate on a sphere (straight lines are not your friend). Much less make an accurate technical drawing without a computer.

It's not really romantic visions of the past but practical thought. I know I had a very old geometry book in middle school which was heavy on the logic and light on the 'fun' and these things help now with solving problems. I remember wanting to kill myself when I tried a 'new' calculus text where they converted radians into degrees because it just didn't make sense until someone explained 1 rad is the arc length of the radius of the circle >.>

Computers might make things faster or more efficient, but people probably have less understanding of how those computers work then they did when these programs were first being developed. I don't think forcing people to learn each step in a system would be a particularly bad thing to go back to. Less emphasis on speed and more on understanding and deliberative design can only be good things.

You may opinionate.
 
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We could also light fires by rubbing sticks together as well. However, it all boils down to time. If we want to invent a new propulsion engine to get us beyond the solar system, we need to skip these 'simple' things.
 
I hated doing paste-ups and making acetates during my beginning graphic design classes. It is a waste of time to learn how to do these things. They are obsolete in a practical world.

There are those that will gain understanding if they want to and there are those that will not. No sense in forcing the understanding when it is unnecessary.

Now, on the flip-side, it annoys me that I only have a few phone numbers memorized. When I had all my phone numbers typed up on a piece of paper (refreshed every 6 months), jammed in to my wallet, I knew most of them by heart. Now, with a cell phone, I couldn't even tell you my own mother's phone number. Oddly enough, I do have theac's home number memorized. :fly:
 
As someone who spends 50% of his day drafting with AutoCAD... someone with a peice of paper and a straight edge couldn't do what I do in 10 minutes if I gave them all day. Nore would knowing how they do it help me do my job any better at all.

I've looked over plenty of blueprints we've found in mechanical rooms of buildings from the 1920's and on... they suck. they really suck. just becuase a textbook teaches to draw stuff to scale, doesn't mean they were any good at it. :(
 
fly said:
We could also light fires by rubbing sticks together as well. However, it all boils down to time. If we want to invent a new propulsion engine to get us beyond the solar system, we need to skip these 'simple' things.
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Still something useful to know but you missed the point. You're focused on the method not the abstract process, I was saying you shouldnt be allowed to have sticks until you knew why rubbing them together made fire.

Sp`ange said:
~snip~

There are those that will gain understanding if they want to and there are those that will not. No sense in forcing the understanding when it is unnecessary.

~snip~
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Only part that was close to what I was getting at. Understanding why things work is necessary in certain fields. Graphic design tends more toward art though? Im not sure if there's an analog exactly, more a long the lines of not understanding perspective or composition. Better analogy would be not understanding page layout in typography but only knowing how to select templates.
 
plot said:
As someone who spends 50% of his day drafting with AutoCAD... someone with a peice of paper and a straight edge couldn't do what I do in 10 minutes if I gave them all day. Nore would knowing how they do it help me do my job any better at all.

I've looked over plenty of blueprints we've found in mechanical rooms of buildings from the 1920's and on... they suck. they really suck. just becuase a textbook teaches to draw stuff to scale, doesn't mean they were any good at it. :(
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You know blueprints are the crap temporary drawings you carry around right, the only master prints I've ever seen are usually framed, though they really dont look much better your average CAD printout they are inhumanly precise. This is focusing on the tools again though, my point was the knowledge of how they work, it just seemed like an easy analog to make.

I specifically said for learning. Once you understand the principles of 'why' it works, using tools that emphasize efficiency is perfectly normal. Again technical drawing seemed to me, or in my experience, something where it would be easy to see this. You cant do pen and paper layouts if you don't have a firm grip on geometry, every task requires some execution of basic plane geometry. I guess surveying would've been a better example.

The point is rather, computers deemphasize the abstraction of problems by solving them discretely. It works on a small scale but the more precise and the larger the application the greater the error. Along with the fact that a solid grounding in logic means that no math is beyond understanding because if forced to you can make all the necessary constructions. If you know all the formula by heart but have no concept of logic you are limited to only that which you have knowledge of.
 
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My point is, most drafting is technical drawings... it's walls of a building with a few doors dropped in, for the technical drawings there's often a library of thousands of blocks/templates to start with for that particular application, if there isn't a program where you enter in a few numbers and it generates the whole thing for you.
 
I think I have something to say about this as I have been doing it for more than ten years. I'll get back to you.
 
April40 said:
I'm trying not use a calculator to do my math homework. :tard:
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They doled out TI-85's in my highschool calculus class. The teacher was rather intelligent and he made sure his questions required a knowledge of how to figure something out without the calculator. When I took another calculus class in college I could use the calculator to breeze through a less than intelligent professor's problems. And he commented on it. But I could also put the calculator away and still give a correct answer.
 
plot said:
My point is, most drafting is technical drawings... it's walls of a building with a few doors dropped in, for the technical drawings there's often a library of thousands of blocks/templates to start with for that particular application, if there isn't a program where you enter in a few numbers and it generates the whole thing for you.
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I was meaning more the things where it has a block for steps pasted in and then an annotation for 'Helical stairs rising 12'10" over 1.5 revolutions.'
 
April40 said:
I'm trying not use a calculator to do my math homework. :tard:
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I admit to using a calculator for arithmetic, but only because it's tiring to repeatedly figure large sums and I kinda suck at addition and subtraction of integers >.>
 
FlamingGlory said:
Only part that was close to what I was getting at. Understanding why things work is necessary in certain fields. Graphic design tends more toward art though? Im not sure if there's an analog exactly, more a long the lines of not understanding perspective or composition. Better analogy would be not understanding page layout in typography but only knowing how to select templates.
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Graphic design is art that pays. There's a big deal with designing something that meets the needs of printers. I was speaking of the technical aspect of graphic design. Paste-ups and acetates are for sending to press. I'm sure there aren't many designers that know what either of them are, let alone know what is behind them. They don't need to know. That's where the analogy is. In today's world with today's technology, there is no need to know or understand it. It won't improve your job performance.

Being taught something and knowing that information does not mean you understand. Understanding comes from experience. It can't be taught. And like plot said, just because you know something doesn't make you any better at accomplishing it.
 
Sp`ange said:
Graphic design is art that pays. There's a big deal with designing something that meets the needs of printers. I was speaking of the technical aspect of graphic design. Paste-ups and acetates are for sending to press. I'm sure there aren't many designers that know what either of them are, let alone know what is behind them. They don't need to know. That's where the analogy is. In today's world with today's technology, there is no need to know or understand it. It won't improve your job performance.

Being taught something and knowing that information does not mean you understand. Understanding comes from experience. It can't be taught. And like plot said, just because you know something doesn't make you any better at accomplishing it.
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You are still describing arbitrary tools. Im talking about abstract processes. The stab at technical drawing was because the more primitive the tools the more you have to understand about the system. Before there were paste ups, Im sure there was something else, been more evolutions in printing than in drawing. I assume they dont directly influence the composition of the design though.

Understanding has nothing to do with experience in abstract ideas, having experience finding the area of a triangle will not make you understand why it's the area of a triangle if you have no knowledge of geometry. It's a black box process you plug numbers into. Understanding why is important if you want to progress beyond that point. Obviously not the best example. Hopefully getting the point across >.>
 
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