[Elianna]

Antrax, on 2014-May-20, 21:24, said:

But... you really can't do that. Did your math teacher not know any calculus?

Or even not know Trig proofs (work on one side completely to show it is equal to the other).

[y66]

helene_t, on 2014-May-21, 02:21, said:

What is the point of rating the problems at all?

The point of rating problems is to provide a rough ordering to guide discovery as in

Quote

“No step is too small to ignore,” Mighton says. “Math is like a ladder. If you miss a step, sometimes you can’t go on. And then you start losing your confidence and then the hierarchies develop. It’s all interconnected.”

Mighton saw that if he approached teaching this way, he could virtually guarantee that every student would experience success. In turn, the children’s math anxiety diminished. As they grew more confident, they grew excited, and they began requesting harder challenges. “More than anything, kids love success,” he says, “and they love getting to higher levels, like in a video game.”

As the children experienced repeated success, it seemed to Mighton that their brains actually began to work more efficiently. Sometimes adding one more drop of knowledge led to a leap in understanding. One day, a child would be struggling; the next day she would solve a problem that was harder than anything she’d previously handled. Mighton saw that if you provided painstaking guidance, children would make their own discoveries. That’s why he calls his approach “guided discovery.”

From a A Better Way to Teach Math

This is probably also why Louis Watson chose to present the material in The Play of the Hand at Bridge in a non random order and why trigonometry is taught before calculus.

[inquiry]

Fluffy, on 2014-May-21, 00:48, said:

Ben I am curious, how much time do you invest to publish one of those problems?

In my page grand slams are the easiest to program since defene has to just follow suit and with whatever trick they can, assuming there are no bidding alternatives those hands could take me between 20 and 30 minutes (the average is around 90 minutes)

I wouldn't do it if it took anywhere near that long. I review a lot of hands on BBO that others play for obvious reasons I will not mention here. Very few of the hands was I one of the players at the table (all most all of my personal hands are from face to face are in notebooks, so that takes longer to enter those, as I have to place the cards manually). When I see a hand I think is interesting, I do this....

I cut the http://bridgebase address line and paste it into excel in file I call "bridgehands". currently there are 2754 hands in that file. I add just a few notes, one is declarer (E,W,S.N) in one cell, dealer (N,S,E,W) in another, and a comment or two on type of play required (most interesting addition is expert, complex). Then I have a couple of cells to pull the hands out via position, then another cell that rotates the hand so that declarer is always south (it take the original declarer hand and moves it from wherever to the South Seat and rotates the position of the other seats so that they are in the correct position and bidding stays correctly originated. This also strips out the players names for me, Then I have a concatenate command that adds the handviewer tag equals lin stuff with the modified (rotated hand without players). I then copy the cell I want and paste it into the forum. I manually remove the hands I don't want in the problem once I paste it in the forum by changing something like SAKQH432DQJTC7654 with shdc, and edit out the plays I don't want shown.

I don't really create any hands from scratch, although occasionally I will move a card from one hand or change the split of a suit when the solution is revealed if that is needed to make to the reason for the solution obvious I can paste one of the hands in just a minute or two if it doesn't require a lot of talk.

Keeping track of hands in excel has worked out to be a wonderful way to manage, sort, classify, find, and post hands. You might want to consider automating some of your process. But you have lots of problems as players will take losing lines, I don't have any interactive problems when posting on the forum.

[blackshoe]

Antrax, on 2014-May-20, 21:24, said:

But... you really can't do that. Did your math teacher not know any calculus?

I suspect he did.

Maybe I'm misremembering it — it was a half century ago, after all. I'm pretty sure, though, that calculus was involved somehow, because that was his objection — I wasn't supposed to know calculus yet. I did take the AP calculus course, but that was two years later.

[barmar]

It seems like we have two completely different discussions going on here:

1. How to teach bridge beginners, including what should be in the B/I forum.

2. How to teach students in general. I thought the bridge material in the OP was just intended as an example that all of us would understand.

All the detailed bridge- and forum-specific discussion doesn't seem to be appropriate for the WC.

[kenberg]

inquiry, on 2014-May-21, 09:22, said:

I wouldn't do it if it took anywhere near that long. I review a lot of hands on BBO that others play for obvious reasons I will not mention here. Very few of the hands was I one of the players at the table (all most all of my personal hands are from face to face are in notebooks, so that takes longer to enter those, as I have to place the cards manually). When I see a hand I think is interesting, I do this....

I cut the http://bridgebase address line and paste it into excel in file I call "bridgehands". currently there are 2754 hands in that file. I add just a few notes, one is declarer (E,W,S.N) in one cell, dealer (N,S,E,W) in another, and a comment or two on type of play required (most interesting addition is expert, complex). Then I have a couple of cells to pull the hands out via position, then another cell that rotates the hand so that declarer is always south (it take the original declarer hand and moves it from wherever to the South Seat and rotates the position of the other seats so that they are in the correct position and bidding stays correctly originated. This also strips out the players names for me, Then I have a concatenate command that adds the handviewer tag equals lin stuff with the modified (rotated hand without players). I then copy the cell I want and paste it into the forum. I manually remove the hands I don't want in the problem once I paste it in the forum by changing something like SAKQH432DQJTC7654 with shdc, and edit out the plays I don't want shown.

I don't really create any hands from scratch, although occasionally I will move a card from one hand or change the split of a suit when the solution is revealed if that is needed to make to the reason for the solution obvious I can paste one of the hands in just a minute or two if it doesn't require a lot of talk.

Keeping track of hands in excel has worked out to be a wonderful way to manage, sort, classify, find, and post hands. You might want to consider automating some of your process. But you have lots of problems as players will take losing lines, I don't have any interactive problems when posting on the forum.

Could you say a little more about just what you do? Let me explain.

I save hands. When I am in the online version I save them to, I thinnk, Hands and Results. Or some similar name. I can edit them there. I can attach comments. I can send them by e-mail to a friend. What I cannot do, or at least do not not know how to do, is to easily insert them into a forum post. Any one individual hand is fine. I just start a message in the forum and use the forum hand editor to do it, but I have to put everything in from the start, clicking on who is vul, who is the dealer, etc and then clicking on the cards.

Are you saying, for example, that there is an easier way to do this? I am assuming that there is, I just don't know it. A link to instructions would be fine. As for Excel, I am unclear as to what role it plays. I have hands sitting on my computer, or maybe they are just links, but I click on them and a hand comes up in the vugraph, so what more does Excel do?

[FM75]

helene_t, on 2014-May-21, 02:21, said:

What is the point of rating the problems at all? Not only do we apparently have very different ideas about what a novice or a beginner is (to me, a novice can draw trumps and a beginner can take a finese in the trump suit while an intermediate can postpone drawing trumps in order to make a ruff in dummy, but that's just me).

But also, even if we had the exact same target group in mind, different modes of teaching would call for different kind of hands. If the students are meant to play the hands, they should be quite easy. If they are meant to solve them on paper and will be guided in the analysis ("how many hearts can partner have?" etc) they can be a lot more difficult.

The problems are great, I just wish that we didn't get distracted by this futile rating discussion.

I would rate quantum electrodynamics (includes relativistic effects) as significantly harder than quantum mechanics. Each is impossibly hard without an understanding of calculus and partial differential equations, and the first is truly difficult with limited knowledge of particle physics.

If you punt on rating problems, analogously, we might ask first graders to solve Ph. D. level problems in any subject.

Rating is (I hope, now) obviously important. Does it need to be one dimensional? Likely not.

Perhaps Ben's problems need some sort of rating system that includes pre-requisites. Even then, there may be an occasional problem that can be solved with either of two prerequisites - and resulting in two different solutions, to be truly interesting. I have seen this in a published software program by our revered host.

Can we give Ben his own section for his problems?

[inquiry]

kenberg, on 2014-May-21, 11:09, said:

Could you say a little more about just what you do? Let me explain.

Ok, I will, but in a new thread.

[blackshoe]

Heh. Story goes that some physics professor wrote a new textbook. Only, he didn't indicate the difficulty level of the problems in the back of each chapter. He told the class "Some of these are homework problems, and some are research problems. Try to do at least all the homework problems." Students asked "but how are we to know which are homework problems, and which are research problems?" "Simple," said the prof. "If you can find the answer it's a homework problem."

When I was in high school, I picked up a theoretical physics book that was written by some Russian. First part was Mechanics. I had no problem with that. Second was Quantum Mechanics. Okay, that was a little hard. Third part was Quantum Electrodynamics. I was very confused by that part.

[Fluffy]

inquiry, on 2014-May-21, 09:22, said:

Keeping track of hands in excel has worked out to be a wonderful way to manage, sort, classify, find, and post hands. You might want to consider automating some of your process. But you have lots of problems as players will take losing lines, I don't have any interactive problems when posting on the forum.

It took me a lot to master it, but I can get hands and plays included from lin files automatically now. It saves a lot of time, right now only works for team matches, travelers for mbc hands aren't working not sure why.

But most of my hands come from deals not played online sadly. So I enter them manually.

[kenberg]

blackshoe, on 2014-May-22, 22:14, said:

Heh. Story goes that some physics professor wrote a new textbook. Only, he didn't indicate the difficulty level of the problems in the back of each chapter. He told the class "Some of these are homework problems, and some are research problems. Try to do at least all the homework problems." Students asked "but how are we to know which are homework problems, and which are research problems?" "Simple," said the prof. "If you can find the answer it's a homework problem."

When I was in high school, I picked up a theoretical physics book that was written by some Russian. First part was Mechanics. I had no problem with that. Second was Quantum Mechanics. Okay, that was a little hard. Third part was Quantum Electrodynamics. I was very confused by that part.

I think that we must seriously consider the possibility that in high school you were an even weirder duck than I was!

[blackshoe]

kenberg, on 2014-May-23, 09:12, said:

I think that we must seriously consider the possibility that in high school you were an even weirder duck than I was!

Wouldn't surprise me any.