Awesome idea! I’m curious about some of the details of the event if you’d be willing to share, partly because I’ve thought of trying something similar for programming stuff:
What math topics did you cover and at what level of detail did you cover them?
Was the instruction purely informational (one person explaining to another) or were there also problems involved (tutor posing a problem and giving the tutee time to think it through and try to solve it)?
Were there people who consider themselves “bad at math” or “not math people” included? Did their views change at all after the event?
In my session I told the tutee to try to prove something and gave hints when he got stuck / warned him when he was going in a wrong direction. For me the most challenging part was coming up with the topic since I wanted to find something that the tutee would have a good chance of figuring out without having to guess a “trick”—in the end I just said “OK the trick is you just draw this one line here, now you have to analyze the diagram to see how it proves the Pythagorean theorem”.
I mostly don’t know what was covered because I didn’t get to see most of the tutor-tutee pairs; they decided between themselves what to cover. Topics I saw included the Euclidean algorithm (slightly disguised), NP-completeness, the Pythagorean theorem, proofs in linear algebra, and some other stuff I’m forgetting. Detail is whatever people could get through in 30-40 minutes. Tutors used their discretion about how much to do things like problems / exercises.
Yes, I think there were people who considered themselves “bad at math” there, but I didn’t really ask questions about this in particular. Hopefully if any of those people are reading they can chime in.
Awesome idea! I’m curious about some of the details of the event if you’d be willing to share, partly because I’ve thought of trying something similar for programming stuff:
What math topics did you cover and at what level of detail did you cover them?
Was the instruction purely informational (one person explaining to another) or were there also problems involved (tutor posing a problem and giving the tutee time to think it through and try to solve it)?
Were there people who consider themselves “bad at math” or “not math people” included? Did their views change at all after the event?
In my session I told the tutee to try to prove something and gave hints when he got stuck / warned him when he was going in a wrong direction. For me the most challenging part was coming up with the topic since I wanted to find something that the tutee would have a good chance of figuring out without having to guess a “trick”—in the end I just said “OK the trick is you just draw this one line here, now you have to analyze the diagram to see how it proves the Pythagorean theorem”.
I mostly don’t know what was covered because I didn’t get to see most of the tutor-tutee pairs; they decided between themselves what to cover. Topics I saw included the Euclidean algorithm (slightly disguised), NP-completeness, the Pythagorean theorem, proofs in linear algebra, and some other stuff I’m forgetting. Detail is whatever people could get through in 30-40 minutes. Tutors used their discretion about how much to do things like problems / exercises.
Yes, I think there were people who considered themselves “bad at math” there, but I didn’t really ask questions about this in particular. Hopefully if any of those people are reading they can chime in.