[drorco]

Same. I really struggle to learn anything which I can't see a practical use for.

Just as an example, in high school learning trigonometry was really difficult for me, like why would I even care about finding an angle in a triangle, etc.?

Only once I studied physics or game dev, this has started to become relevant, and then studying it got SO MUCH easier.

[Solvency]

It's mindboggling to me that every teacher doesn't just debut the subject with videogames as a reference.

"Alright everyone, let's make a video game character out of triangles".

"Let's make a little cannon that you can change the angle of. How do you calculate the angle? Funny you should ask.."

"Now let's learn how you'd make the fireball move up and down as it travels. That's a sine wave!"

Every single student understands the basic concept of a game visually, even if they don't play them regularly. It's just a perfect frame of reference and context for applying the concepts in 2D, and then in 3D. And it's so easy to help the students understand how easily those concepts get extrapolated to other things (engineering, sports, whatever).

[drorco]

Totally! One of the first thing I did after learning Newton's law of gravity, was to write down a small simulation of planets in orbit and how they "dance" around each other. This little exercise totally blew my mind and the code was really simple to code.

There's probably an untapped opportunity here, but ed-tech is such a difficult industry.

[grugagag]

Back when I studied these videogames were much simpler. I was explained instead calculating areas and volumes for various functions and that was enough for me to get it. The thing is that not everyone was confused and some can take in theory without a practical application. They’re different modes of thinking and I appreciate both, I just happen to fall in the practical group.

[TeMPOraL]

Wonder how many people here have similar story.

In primary and secondary school, I had troubles with math - mostly caused by me not doing homework exercises and generally avoiding work (probably an early indication of an issue that took 20 more years to diagnose...). It all changed when I got interested in gamedev - suddenly, I've caught up with most of the material I was bad at, quickly learned trigonometry beyond the secondary school program, and then some basic vector and matrix algebra - and I distinctly remember it all starting with a simple problem: how to make a sprite rotate and move in circles?

Couple decades later, I still have a kind of theory+applications mindset: I always seek to generalize and abstract, but I feel lost when presented with a new abstraction without any context. Over the years, I realized I learn and understand things most effectively by seeking out answers to the question: why?. Not in the sense of, "what will I ever use this for?", but in the sense of "why was this invented?", "what were the problems people who invented it were trying to solve?". I trace the topic back in time until I find the point where the "why" and "how" are both apparent, and then go forward from there.

[jerf]

I would love to have some sort of statistics on what the proportion of this feeling is. My suspicion is that the practical approach is probably about 90% of the population (who is willing to learn math at all). Would be helpful in trying to figure out how to tune learning programs. (I say this as one who is perfectly content to learn the theory directly and with little-to-no practical motivation, but my impression is I'm very much in the minority on that.)

I was going to say that the curriculum is tuned in favor of those who can just learn by theory, but then I realized that's not even true. It's tuned in favor of those who will simply swallow it without any idea what it is for; it is neither contextualized in terms of what it is practically good for, nor is it contextualized in terms of theory. It's just... there.

[grugagag]

I’d be curious to see that as well. I loved math until it became too abstract for me to grasp so I lost interest in it. And that worked pretty well as a self selection for the field, well, a large part of it. I wouldn’t want to be in the academia anyways…

[siftrics]

> I really struggle to learn anything which I can't see a practical use for.

That's a close-minded, ignorant world view. Much of the world's most important advancements were made before any practical use could be seen. Why do you think that way?

[TeMPOraL]

> Much of the world's most important advancements were made before any practical use could be seen.

In a sense, yes. But usually this was kind of accidental - as in, people making those breakthroughs weren't doing it because they loved manipulating abstract symbols, or believed that someone, somewhen will find it useful; rather, they had some immediate-term reason for doing the work - a problem to solve, a person to impress, or just doing it for shits and giggles - and only later it turned out their work was the key to something transformative.

I have a similar "mental make" as GP too. Over the years I realized that for me, it's not about practical use to me - it's about knowing why something was invented, what problems the inventors were trying to solve. Learning the historical motivation "grounds" the concept for me, and makes it much easier to understand.

[drorco]

It's just the way my mind works and motivated. Motivation is a very elusive feeling that I did not find easy ways to manipulate. It's not as if I'm totally blocked from learning stuff with no clear purpose, but it will require much more mental capacity that is often difficult to muster in the day-to-day routine. Another example, is I did try to learn what I perceive as totally theoretical math such as "prove that there are infinite primary numbers" which was a nice idea to entertain, but it didn't really make me want to dig in further. On the other hand, learning about linear algebra in the context of machine learning, suddenly got Linear Algebra a lot more interesting and easy to learn.

[qorrect]

> Why do you think that way?

Probably the same reason that you're such an ass (genes).