<story><title>Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need</title><url>http://mkremins.github.io/blog/doors-headaches-intellectual-need/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>greghendershott</author><text>My most unrewarding educational experiences felt like I was being fire hosed solutions to problems I didn&amp;#x27;t have. This is a big challenge in the early stages of learning any subject.&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, experienced software developers benefit from barely-learning about many solutions to problems they don&amp;#x27;t have, yet. What I mean is a style of skimming stuff like API documentation. You don&amp;#x27;t really learn it. You can&amp;#x27;t recall details. But you can recognize its applicability. Someday a problem tickles your memory, and you know roughly where to go looking for the details. And of course then you&amp;#x27;re really motivated to learn it, for real. You have an immediate need.</text></comment>
<story><title>Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need</title><url>http://mkremins.github.io/blog/doors-headaches-intellectual-need/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>javajosh</author><text>Yes! In fact I&amp;#x27;ve often considered this question in the context of teaching physics - wouldn&amp;#x27;t it be wonderful if you started with a really hard problem, flailed around for a while, and then learned the thing that could solve it for you? Instead (in basic mechanics) we get &amp;quot;f=ma&amp;quot; and then see how it applies to a bunch of systems, instead of first looking at some idealized systems and challenging a student to ask some really basic questions about it. (Not necessarily the full equations of motion, which might not make sense yet, but basic stuff like &amp;quot;how fast does this weight need to move before it leaves contact with this curved surface&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;(Actually, it&amp;#x27;s a little more involved with &amp;quot;F=ma&amp;quot; because really that&amp;#x27;s a key to a bunch of other keys - it yields closed form solutions to a bunch of important problems which are characterized by whether &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; is constant (linear motion), proportional to x (a spring), proportional to x^2 (gravity, electrostatics), their rotational analogues, and so on. BTW it still trips me out that Newton &lt;i&gt;saw this connection&lt;/i&gt; to so many disparate systems, but I&amp;#x27;m deeply grateful that he did.)</text></comment>