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shared by Peter Kronfeld on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached

Like many children with autism spectrum disorders, Ravi is fascinated by trains and buses, entranced by their motion and predictability.
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Now, the museum, and others like it, are moving beyond accommodating the enthusiasm for trains and buses among children with autism and trying to use it to teach them how to connect with other people — and the world.
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The link between trains and autism is well documented. Autism refers to a spectrum of disorders that typically includes impairment in social interaction and sometimes includes stereotyped interests, like trains. People with autism have difficulty processing and making sense of the world, so they are drawn to predictable patterns, which, of course, trains run by.
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Some researchers have been trying to harness this preoccupation to help children with autism develop. Simon Baron Cohen, who runs the autism research center at Cambridge University, found that when young children with autism spent 15 minutes a day watching animated videos of vehicles with human faces on them, their ability to recognize emotions improved after one month. “Kids with autism treat moving trains, especially ones that have limited motion like just going along the tracks, as a natural reward,” he said. “It catches their attention. Once you’ve got the child’s attention, you can do many types of teaching.”
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shared by Peter Kronfeld on 02 Jan 15 - No Cached

There are three formal AIMS undertakings: a master’s degree program in Mathematical Sciences, research, and teacher training. The master’s program offers free tuition to accepted students and trains them in both general principles – problem formulation, the scientific method, communication – and cutting-edge math in subjects including computer science, biomathematics, and financial mathematics. Research will allow for international collaborations and advanced student training.
- Peter Kronfeld on 02 Jan 15
  
  Brilliant: applied math (CompSci, bio, financial) and 3 keys: problem formulation, the scientific method, and communication
  
  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Brilliant: applied math (CompSci, bio, financial) and 3 keys: problem formulation, the scientific method, and communication</div>
  
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Traditionally, classrooms were led by an authoritative teacher who disseminated information to silent students, but Zomahoun hopes to turn that paradigm on its head. “We train people who can challenge the status quo,” he explains, “not just people who learn from books, listen to lectures, and just repeat it.” Rather, he hopes to instill qualities like “critical thinking, independent thinking, and problem solving” in order to prepare students for real-world problems.
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shared by Peter Kronfeld on 07 Jun 11 - No Cached

Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against.
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Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of this same bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle, new studies suggest.
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Yet there is growing evidence that a certain kind of training — visual, fast-paced, often focused on classifying problems rather then solving them — can build intuition quickly
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In a test on the skills given afterward, on problems the students hadn’t seen before, the group got 73 percent correct. A comparison group of seventh graders, who’d been taught how to solve such problems as part of regular classes, scored just 25 percent on the test.
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“I find that often students will try to solve problems by doing only what they’ve been told to do, and if that doesn’t work they give up,” said Joe Wise, a physics instructor at New Roads School, where the study was done. “Here they’re forced to try what makes sense to them and to keep trying. The brain is very good at sorting out patterns if you give it the chance and the right feedback.”
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