Writing a computer program is often the best way to convince yourself that you really understand a problem. And an already-written computer program is often a good way to document the behavior of a complex system because you can play with it to see what happens in all the edge cases.
So I'm writing curricula that use computer programs as the primary teaching tool. One is for computer science, where the idea is that anyone who can read some python can pick up all the important ideas from a formal CS education without sitting through a year or more of preliminaries. Over time I'm planning to add smaller sections on more advanced topics.
The other curriculum is theoretical physics. There's already a good book that does classical mechanics [1] in scheme. I've hired some postdocs to learn scheme and code lessons in general relativity, statistical mechanics and so on. I do the lessons, solve the problems, and then we talk about what worked and what didn't. I work on this about ten hours a week. After a couple of years I should have knowledge roughly equivalent to an ABD physics grad student, plus teaching material that can take anyone else to the same level from modest beginnings.
I'm looking for collaborators on this project so don't be a stranger. Twitter/email is in my profile
I was just ranting on HN about the need for this two weeks ago. It seems like the inevitable end game for teaching of hard sciences (and possibly other fields). One inspiration (besides the book you referenced) is there first few posts of "An Intuitive Explanation of Quantum Mechanics".
Here is a great example[1] where he describes QM as essentially a computational process and does everything just shy of writing down the code. That specific page is from the series here [2].
And from reading this I realized how much easier many concepts would be to grasp if you could just read the objective source code of the description and not have to try to interpret messy English or imprecise notations.
This is a great idea. I've personally benefited from using Python as a way to experiment with other disciplines and wish there were more such resources out there.
oh that's a neat idea! It's the next natural step in pedagogy. In my applied math undergraduate program we had a substantial programming component to better understand the concepts.
So I'm writing curricula that use computer programs as the primary teaching tool. One is for computer science, where the idea is that anyone who can read some python can pick up all the important ideas from a formal CS education without sitting through a year or more of preliminaries. Over time I'm planning to add smaller sections on more advanced topics.
The other curriculum is theoretical physics. There's already a good book that does classical mechanics [1] in scheme. I've hired some postdocs to learn scheme and code lessons in general relativity, statistical mechanics and so on. I do the lessons, solve the problems, and then we talk about what worked and what didn't. I work on this about ten hours a week. After a couple of years I should have knowledge roughly equivalent to an ABD physics grad student, plus teaching material that can take anyone else to the same level from modest beginnings.
I'm looking for collaborators on this project so don't be a stranger. Twitter/email is in my profile
[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/sicm-html/bo...