Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/maker_faire_and_science_education_american_kids_should_be_building_rockets_and_robots_not_taking_standardized_tests_.html <comment><USER2> Sigh. You need both. The reality is that there's a lot of book-learning in the world. You're never going to build a rocket to the moon by starting in your backyard with some sheet metal - your lifespan isn't long enough if you take that approach. You have to read books written by people who have gone before, and learn from their mistakes, which you can do at a far more rapid pace than you can by making all those mistakes yourself. Only by standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before - that is, by reading their books - can you hope to push boundaries.

The writer's complaint is daft. The purpose is to test if you can read a passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes. Has nothing to do with "teaching science", as the writer asserts. Just because he doesn't understand the purpose of the test doesn't mean there isn't one. Reading and comprehending text is one of life's fundamental skills. It is, in fact, useful to know if schools are teaching that well or not.

Before I get downvoted into oblivion I should say I also think schools should do hands-on work (which, of course, they do).

<comment><USER3> _The writer's complaint is daft. The purpose is to test if you can read a passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes._

From my understanding of cognitive science, the question asked is deeply flawed if you want to test comprehension without testing knowledge of microscopes.

One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model in your head of what is being described. You then answer questions about the model in your head. Experience with microscopes or similar devices is incredibly valuable to building such a model in your head and answering questions about it. This was one of the "big problems" in first generation AI: to answer questions, a computer must be able to construct models, and to construct models, a computer needs a huge amount of real-world experience.

What I'm saying is that answering this question well requires experience with microscopes or similar devices. Being able to answer the question without prior knowledge of what a microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses period, or refracting telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.

Now, there may be a good reason why an entire test full of a variety of such questions is effective for accomplishing whatever the school board wants accomplished—getting funding, I imagine—but I stop well short of saying the author's complaint is "daft." I think there are good reasons to be curious about the biases inherent in this question, and about where schools end up if they build their entire approach to teaching around scoring well on questions like this.

<comment><USER2> > One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model

This test question isn't testing that.

> What I'm saying is that answering this question well requires experience > with microscopes or similar devices.

It sure doesn't. It requires you to be able to read and comprehend text. That's it. The subject could have been Martian fizzbozzles instead of microscopes.

> Being able to answer the question without prior knowledge of what a > microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses period, or refracting > telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.

It sure isn't. Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no prior knowledge of the subject.

<comment><USER3> My HN friend, my argument was that the writer isn't _daft_ , and neither is his complaint, and I stand by that. My argument is that the writer raises interesting and useful questions, and I stand by that too.

As to the fact that the question doesn't test internal modelling, of course it does. If you made it a question about something nobody has ever seen before, then it wouldn't test knowledge of microscopes. But it does ask about microscopes.

Perhaps, in aggregate, the test covers enough subject areas that the students tested will be exposed to a roughly equal mix of things they have experience with and things they don't. But as I noted elsewhere, the fact that it's possible to answer this question from the text alone in no way changes the fact that it's easier to answer the question with prior experience. And from that, I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask whether this is a good question.

<comment><USER4> Yes, if it were truly just about reading comprehension, then the test-writers would be horrifically incompetent, and therefore unfit to test anyone. Anyone who competently designs tests (experimenters, pollsters, etc) knows to address such biasing factors.

But I think the testers aren't total morons, and know that such a question is biased towards children with proper (privileged) backgrounds where microscopes and the respective training are commonplace. They'll be faster at answering the question and not feel ignorant — crucial advantages on tests.

(The testers may not even like this facet of their jobs, like ad industry developers who use ad-blockers, but it sure beats unemployment.)

And the whole question smacks of "scientism", where tools are confused with science. You never see a question like, _"Scientists have believed something for 200 years. Is it necessarily true?"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 'We walked into an empty room that once was the metal shop. It was perfect. I could imagine it having tools and materials and workbenches. I could imagine groups of curious kids being active, social, and mobile. '

When I was in 6th grade, they let us use a spot welder and press brake. I still have the box I made out of folded sheet metal from that time. We also had to make a little container out of folded sheet metal that surrounded an egg. The metal shop teacher piled weights on everyone's in the class until the eggs broke.

In 8th grade (2001), they let us use MIG welders and the project was to make a crane with the maximum cantilever given a set of counterweights and a limited amount of 1/8"x1" steel. I remember the entire class standing around watching as we piled weights up until they failed spectactulary.

It's not a coincidence that those are some of my (few) vivid memories of middle school. I remember being bored in a lot of classes that simply weren't challenging enough, but never in metal shop or science class.

They don't even have metal or wood shop in the middle school anymore. They barely have it in the high school. It's probably some combination of safety and budget, but can anyone imagine the school allowing basically 13 year olds to handle MIG welders anymore? It gets hot! Or sheet metal in 11 year olds hands? It's sharp!

By high school all of the best and brightest are maxing out AP classes for college applications. There is no time left for 'fun' classes like metal shop if you aren't going to trade school. (That becomes quite apparent when you get to college and there are mechanical engineer majors who can't work a hand drill.)

If we lose all of this stuff, we are going to lose the next generation of engineers. FIRST robotics is a great program, but we need more things like it.

<comment><USER5> Part of this is just a reflection of the changing economy. Shop classes were funded when there was a demand in our economy for people who made things. Now that we've outsourced the making of things to China, there's no perceived need for learning how things are made anymore; they just _get made_ , somewhere out of sight, and when they break we throw them away and buy new ones.

This is a strangely infantile way for a society to live. Part of the mystique grown-ups had to me when I was a kid was that grown-ups were the ones who _knew how things worked_ \-- I knew how to _break_ my toys, but only grown-ups knew how to _fix_ them. Growing up was the process of being initiated into these mysteries. That's less true today; now feels more like an age of adults striving to get back to the (blissful?) ignorance of childhood.

Of course, this feeling could just be an artifact of my being an adult now :-D

<comment><USER6> The US still makes plenty of things. They're just not made by humans.

<comment><USER7> But if you don't know how to weld, solder, hammer, or hot-glue something together yourself, how do you expect to teach a machine to?

When my dad was an engineer, engineers knew how to work the machines. Because a technical drawing isn't just an illustration, it's a set of instructions to someone on how to make that part. For example, the engineer was likely to know, through experience, what tolerances the machines in his shop are capable of, and adjust the tolerances specified on the drawing accordingly (or if the tolerances are bigger than what is required, say "we can't make that part with this equipment").

A few years ago, my dad mentored some college kids who were incredibly smart and eager to learn. But he complained that they had almost never touched a machine in their lives. They didn't know how to design the parts properly. He had to teach them.

<comment><USER8> >>A few years ago, my dad mentored some college kids who were incredibly smart and eager to learn. But he complained that they had almost never touched a machine in their lives. They didn't know how to design the parts properly. He had to teach them.

This happens because no matter what you learn and how much you know in _general_ , that doesn't say anything about ability to deliver in practical areas of work in a small narrow fields.

You can learn everything general about programming. But pick up a new language and you will be hitting the manual very often even to do some very trivial tasks. Or you will like to read existing real world code in that language, to learn the idiomatic way of doing things.

When you spend time solving real world problems in any field using any tool. What you are basically doing is turning yourself into a 'human database' of problems and solutions to a wide variety of problems. And you get that only by practice and experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember taking a standardized test in public elementary school in the US (I think this was the Iowa series). At the end of one section I finished early, I counted the number of questions and was planning on finding out some basic stats on the questions.

We hear "pencils down", and so the break period comes around. I comply, and the teacher collects our tests. I then picked up my pencil again and started doing a bunch of math, trying to find out how many questions there were per section, or how many multiple choice there were in total, basic things like that.

I got in more trouble than I could have ever imagined. The teacher nearly screamed at me for doing math, and threatened to take me to the principle to have me removed from the exam permanently. She feared I was cheating, and forbade me from doing any more math that day outside the strict testing times.

<comment><USER10> Reminds me of my primary school's request to my parents that they stop me from having access to books at home as it was making me difficult to teach.

<comment><USER11> Upvoted a thousand percent. This sums up everything that is wrong with education.

(EDIT: spellchecking my dumb arse)

<comment><USER10> My dad had to explain to them how this wasn't really achievable, even should they want to, as he worked in libraries.

<comment><USER11> Oh, the beautiful but saddening irony.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't like false dichotomies like this. Why can't kids learn to do both well? Standardized tests are akin to FizzBuzz for college entrance. If you can't get 500/800 in the Math SATs, you will not be able to keep up in STEM majors with others who scored 700+.

Given the real constraint of limited resources, you have to implement barriers to entry. Standardized tests are not perfect but they serve well. Of course, making rockets and robots is awesome so everyone should be encouraged to explore that.

<comment><USER13> Agreed! The situation is similar to professional organizations like ACM and IEEE who act as gatekeeper and moneymaker for academic journals, which make people angry (justifiably so). It's a bad solution, but you need _some_ form of reputation management. You can't have kids who want to enroll to MIT line up in a stadium and have them build metal boxes, or write code. However, you can use these as _additional_ input to the standardized test scores.

Articles like this continuously bicker about standardized tests but don't realize how much better the situation is compared with other countries, like China, India, Japan, etc. There _nothing_ else matters other than your score, here at least they look at your application essay, your extracurricular activities and such.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. And in Malaysia, the mostly the only way to obtain that score is brute memorization of facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'll preface this by saying that I hate standardized tests, but this is a good reading comprehension question (and the author clearly has poor reading comprehension.)

The description clearly says:

> 4\. To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the lens > close to the specimen and back off focusing.

This article seems to be celebrating that people can't follow instructions properly. If I were to get some students to play with robotics kits (which may or may not include microscopes) step 1 would be making sure that they understand the instructions for the kits. And a series of questions like this seems like a pretty valid way to test that. Tests are good. I'd even say tests can be crucial before you let kids play with expensive electronics and explosives.

<comment><USER16> > step 1 would be making sure that they understand the instructions for the > kits

That's not the point of hacking.

If I were to get some students to play with robotic kits, I'd give them the parts, instructions and let them do whatever they want. If you remove the "discovery" part, you get something not much different than standarized test itself. If you have kids follow instructions precisely, well, they may as well just watch how it's done on youtube. They won't learn much more from it anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are a number of schools which are now refusing to participate in their states' "mandated" testing. There are a number of conditions that have to be in place for a school to take this step:

\- The school has to be really good at educating students. It has to be clear to visitors that high-level learning is happening every day. The school must be able to prove that all of its students make a successful transition to their post-high-school lives. A successful transition means the student has set goals for what they want to do after high school, and their high school education allows them to move on to these goals.

\- Administrators, and teachers, must not fear losing their jobs. This is much like the programming world, where the best programmers don't have to submit to stupid managerial decisions because they can always find meaningful work elsewhere.

PG encouraged people to replace universities in his PyCon keynote. When asked about replacing high schools, he laughed and said something along the lines of, "Don't touch high schools. That is way too difficult." I think we fix high schools the same way we fix everything else on PG's list - don't attack the big problem itself, just attack a piece of the problem. Build on your successes, until your model of how to run high school is so compelling that everyone else has to use it.

<comment><USER18> That requires competition. Whenever you mention competition and private schools people scream, "But the poor children! They have no chance that way!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's my simple response to a particularly complicated (and touchy) issue: children that do extremely well on standardized tests, especially from an early age, do not need them. If you're consistently in the 90+ percentile in reading comprehension, critical thinking and mathematics from an early age, you are probably not only great at standardized tests, but an intelligent child to boot. These are the kids that should be playing with real-world physics applications (rockets) or rudimentary robotics (Lego Mindstorm).

If, however, you're a child that does consistently _badly_ in these tests, it probably makes sense to get the book learning straight before venturing forth into the practical applications of math and science. After all, the point isn't supposed to be to play with rockets, it's to understand the physics behind them (right?).

Unfortunately, this is an unfair line to draw. Should smart kids get to play with cool science projects while the kids who are struggling--or who were sick on the day of the standardized test--are stuck inside studying "the basics" needed to understand these projects? Personally, I don't think that's fair line to draw.

The result? Everyone needs to be book smart, and hopefully, everyone should _also_ build cool stuff with science.

<comment><USER18> Everyone is not of equal aptitude. It's not possible for everyone to be book smart.

Your attitude about "unfairness" is part of the problem. Schools must stop treating kids as equals when they are clearly not.

<comment><USER19> This issue is where it gets the most complicated for me. I absolutely agree with you that everyone is not of equal aptitude. There are smart kids and less-than-smart kids; athletic kids and those with two left feet. I get that, and agree with it; anyone who doesn't is fooling themselves.

Where I believe we differ in opinion is that kids should be treated differently--especially at a young age--because of this inequality. Different skills develop over time, and although certainly we should have Advanced Placement programs for those in high school, when talking about grade- schoolers, I think that we should let skill first manifest.

Malcolm Gladwell's _Outliers_ had a pretty big impact in my formulation of this opinion: small advantages, over time, turn into huge ones. What seems like a minor issue at first can, through the course of a decade, become many times compounded. This is why the Dutch school system does not separate children into "advanced" and "slow" classes until they are at least ten years old (forgive me if I'm misquoting the text).

Getting a low score on a test, or needing to study for twelve hours instead of six to get an A+, should not limit a child from being able to reach for academic excellence. In the same token, however--and this is where I think many schools fail--the smartest children should not be held back by the less clever ones.

So, in my opinion, if it helps foster learning to build robots and rockets, then all children should. If it's a cool part of an Advanced Placement class that also requires significant knowledge of an advanced subject, sure, keep it for the "smart kids." Let's just not condemn a child to failure because of a bad test, or a bad school year when they're young.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Don't be silly--we won't be eliminating standardized tests any time soon. You can't easily produce huge reports full of meaningless charts or fluff up politicians' resumes with rockets and robots. Standardized tests produce orderly, easily measured numbers that make for lots of easy bean counting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget - realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized test scores.

Why they can't just show a map of median household income (which is a pretty good proxy for standardized test scores) is beyond me.

<comment><USER21> _realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized test scores._

Note that this phoniness about living in one place being a guarantee of a child's school success is so ingrained among real estate agents that they still talk like that even in Minnesota, where there is statewide public school open enrollment, such that the school district where I live has students come in from FORTY-ONE other school districts' territories, including neighborhoods with radically different socioeconomic characteristics. Parents are always looking for some easy proxy for school quality. Power to shop here in Minnesota is helping somewhat in focusing parents' attention on what really matters. (For example, there are more and more school districts now that are adopting the Singapore Primary Mathematics series

[http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39....](http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39.htm)

as elementary mathematics textbooks.)

What's really difficult today is finding out which schools offer genuine added value above what any child could get from an involved set of parents who value education. (This is why I homeschool, even in my apparently very desirable school district, which we live in for employment-based reasons irrespective of the school system.) The interesting article that you kindly submitted here makes the case that young people should do more in youth than what can boil down to answering pencil-and-paper questions on standardized tests, and I agree, and that is another reason we homeschool--to have time for more hands- on, constructive activities. But I will point out that is not an either-or forced choice, as several other comments have also pointed out to you. Indeed, sometimes open-ended projects favor children from wealthy families much more than student evaluation based on learning 3 R subjects that can be tested by standardized tests. The people in my generation in Taiwan were very proud of their standardized test system. When I first went over to Taiwan in 1982, several people pointed out to me that the president's son failed the college entrance exams--in other words, the examination system was above political corruption, fairly administered to all. It certainly served as a path to higher education for many young people who grew up in third-world poverty and had little by way of spare resources for doing projects with anything but school resources. (There IS project-based learning in all the schools of east Asia, contrary to the impression of many Americans, but rather than an either- or forced choice, those schools have a both-and of projects for all, and rigorous standardized tests for all.)

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Make the tests relevant and well written, and accurately scored, and make the 3 R's learning in school efficient enough to allow time for challenging projects. And if the school is resistant to improvement, promote power to shop on the part of parents to nudge schools to do better, and meanwhile get your own children a good education however you can, even if it means that they learn outside school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Who exactly is going to teach children to build rockets and robots? As a country we have pretty much run all the vocational teachers out of the schools. The vocational teachers were good because most did contracting during the summer. Add to this the decline in schools teaching programming[1]. We need to figure a way to get qualified technical / vocational people back into the schools and realize that they need to paid more because of demand in their field.

Standardized tests suck, but they suck less than every other way we have to measure schools in a country-wide manner.

[1] I am wondering where the next generation of programmers is going to come from.

<comment><USER23> [1] Training?

<comment><USER22> by who? when?

<comment><USER23> By employers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From TFA:

 _It failed to convey that the whole purpose of having a microscope is to see things that you can't see with the naked eye._

Umm, the 2nd sentence in the all-caps introduction:

 _BY PRODUCING A MAGNIFIED IMAGE, THE MICROSCOPE REVEALS DETAILS THAT ARE UNDETECTABLE TO THE NAKED EYE_

I understand that the author is trying to make a point, but proving his incompetence in a simple reading comprehension example does not help his case.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have 5 implementable ideas how to bring out schools into the 21st century:

1) Let children solve real world problems. They learn skills that they can use in most every job.

2) Let the children decide which problem they want to tackle. Excellent skills to have: Coming up with ideas, convincing your fellow students to focus the rest of the year on that one problem and focusing on the solution for the rest of the school year. [I can't wait to find out what they will do.]

3) Share the problem, proposed solution as well as the whole process on the web with the world Wikipedia style. We live in a networked world, let's use that opportunity to the fullest. Track progress weekly for a great review at the end of the year and for others to learn from everyones else's progress.

4) Big hand-over of the solution via a presentation in front of students, teachers, parents, … Great skill to have to be able to present your ideas and solution in front of a larger audience.

5) Project Fridays: Every Google employees is allowed to focus 20% of their time on a project of their choosing. Let's do the same with our children in school. 20% is the equivalent to one school day a week. Let's do it on Friday.

My hope is that the first thing the children will do is create the environment for them to tinker to try out solutions in their schools.

Just presented these 5 ideas at TEDx Creative Coast too: [http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/06/video-replay- tedxcc-5-id...](http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/06/video-replay- tedxcc-5-ideas-that-bring-our-schools-into-the-21st-century/)

Please join the movement to make our schools come alive: <http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/05/hello-world/>

Thanks, Mark.

<comment><USER26> Most of those ideas are nice, but not very practical. Some thoughts:

1) Real, actual, real world problems can't be solved in a class room. They are solved in 'the real world', i.e. business and government. Business and government won't let kids have a go at such things because it's too expensive, risky and messy. Companies continually complain about young employees' lack of (VET/STEM)skills, yet when it comes down to it they're really not prepared to run the risk that comes with having young kids (not) solving their actual problems. Now, schools could 'simulate' real problems, and do try to do that, but it's enormously expensive and difficult and not very practical. Also, in our services-based economy most problems are solved through repetitive procedures. This is why there's such a focus on 'transversal' skills these days. Learning how to do look up information, read texts etc are important skills to have. They're the foundation underpinning those transversal skills. The idea is to not let kids learn about just one problem, but about a basic skill set that can be applied to any problem. Combine this focus with the hesitancy of companies, and you can see why these dreaded standardized tests come enter the equation...

2) Many schools already do this or try to do this. The problem is that there are some essential skills kids need to learn, which cannot be removed from the curriculum. Teaching those skills takes up a lot of time. This is why there is little room for such 'free play' in a class room. Creativity is wonderful and essential, but very hard to consistently implement in schools. Especially with the complaints that todays students lack the basics: math&english.

3) Schools already track progress. It's the one thing schools are actually pretty good at, and it has led to a complete focus on metrics that has had the unfortunate side effect of making the test results more important than actual learning outcomes and skills. This is also why I'm pretty cynical about web- based learning: a metrics based system breeds metrics based testing, schooling and studying. IT is a nice luxury, but not (yet?) the solution to our problems. 4) I like this idea. Especially involving the parents. 5) This is really the same idea as option 2. The same issues apply there. I agree that kids should do projects and have so leeway in their choices, but you underestimate the real world problems teachers encounter in a class room. Most students are in fact NOT responsible, smart or capable enough to choose a (relevant, teachable, educational) project and tackle it. Add social problems, broken families, shitty reading comprehension and problem kids to the equation and you can see why this doesn't work for most students. It's a great idea for excellent students though - add it to the curriculum for the better students who do well on tests anyway and it would be fantastic. In fact, don't do it on Fridays. Let them do projects based on what the rest of the class is doing. When everybody else is learning about the planets and the moon, give those 'smart' kids an advanced project about planetary movements and let them present the results to the class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Don't get this stuff backwards.

Schools don't need to build metalshops and have children go through rote construction of standard pieces. That's _the exact same thing_ as standardized testing, we just like it more because we're hackers.

What we need are more fab labs: <http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/faq/>

and hackerspaces.

What we really need is for my city to give a $1 Million endowment to my local hackerspace so that we can properly redo our electrical infrastructure, buy more tools, and run more classes.

And then we need every other city in the country to find similar programs, and nurture them in the same way.

Every single time a kid walks past our lab and starts oogling our display windows, somebody comes out front and gets them inside for a tour.

If it's me touring, and their parents allow it, every single one of them gets to press the go buttons on our HUGE laser cutter, and gets to take home an example of a time that they built something in a hackerspace using a big scary industrial tool: they make a stencil of their name.

That's HUGE.

AND IT WORKS. Remember that kid that was on the front page of a bunch of things shooting marshmallows with the president? He hangs out in our lab. Another of the kids at our lab gave a talk at Ignite Phoenix (which is just like TEDx) about 3d printers (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyZxzkd-Jsk>).

These kids are freaking _awesome_! I wish there were 10 of our labs in Phoenix.

I'm sorry, but the school system is broken. There are a few teachers doing beautiful things, but they're few and far between. In my 12 years in the system, I met one of them.

How many high schools would let me stick around in the shop until 4:00am building? None? How many would give a 12 year old kids' dad a keycard that gets him in 24/7 to use industrial machines, DSOs, SCARY POWER SUPPLIES etc.

Would my high school teacher have been fired if people knew she let me and my friends stay in the computer lab fucking with linux until all hours?

Probably.

Except _that_ fuckery, the thing my teacher probably could have been fired for, was one of the most important experiences of my high school education.

That's...bad.

We don't need to fix the school system. We need a new system entirely.

OH! I wrote an article about exactly this a couple of years ago: <http://newslily.com/blogs/104>

<comment><USER28> Where is your front located that you have so many kids walking by? My hackerspace is located in the back of a high-end furniture store so we don't get that many kids that walk by unfortunately.

<comment><USER27> We're on a main street in an old clothing store.

Here is one of our members giving a video tour: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=I...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IMRXXNs1DPU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My experience with my kids education (Oregon, 4th and 6th) is that there is some standardized testing but there's a ton of hands-on project work. In fact, I think there's maybe too little rigor and too many poster boards and research projects. They definitely learn how to develop ideas, research and present them, that's great.

An area that's underdeveloped is teaching to sift through available information and figure out what's signal and what's noise. I don't know if standard tests could help with that but encouraging close reading and deep thinking about very specific questions is definitely a worthy goal.

</comment><comment><USER30> The inventor of the bubble test wanted to get them removed from schools as a measure of testing knowledge.

[http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/he-invented- bubble-...](http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/he-invented-bubble-tests- but-not-for-this/1195625)

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm amazed at the short-sightedness apparent in this article and in some of the comments here. Yes, the American public education system is broken and is to a large extent too focused on poorly-constructed standardized testing, but imagining that 1) the system used to be better for students, 2) the resources exist for universal project-based learning/assessment, and 3) project-based learning/assessment would fix many/most of the problems ignores the reality of the education system as a whole.

The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

From the article, the question provided is about technical reading comprehension; it has nothing to do with learning how to use a microscope. The text states, "To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the lens close to the specimen...". The question is NOT testing your knowledge of how to use a microscope, it's testing whether you can read an instruction manual, which is actually an important skill that can be difficult to assess through project-based learning. Standardized tests try to package the assessment of a wide range of fundamental skills into a relatively contained, _standardized_ format so that skills are evaluated relative to some clear standard as opposed to each individual teacher's ability to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each of their students. Secondly, the article states that "Schools seem to have forgotten that students learn best when they are engaged; in fact, the biggest problem in schools is boredom." Tell me about a time when the biggest problem in schools was not boredom (or worse). This statement attempts to recall a mythical golden age of education excellence that can be recaptured if only schools could "remember". This is not a memory problem. Public education has become a much more complex beast over the past few decades, and the system is struggling to adapt, not remember how to teach.

There are over a million high school teachers in the US. How many of them could competently replace their core curriculum with project-based learning? What about the ones with 40 students in a classroom? What if half of those students don't have basic English language skills? What if 2-3 of those students have behavior problems and regularly destroy the projects of others?

This is just a tiny sample of the challenges that educators and education researchers are trying to address, and the "make robots" solution only addresses a few problems with the current system while introducing many others. Importantly, there are _hundreds_ , if not thousands, of such initiatives across the country to introduce more hands-on learning. Education research is not only identifying the most effective interactive, project-based teaching methods, but actually working with schools to implement them effectively. This is a long-term, resource-intensive, ongoing development in education, and it will take awhile to get it right. Trust me, the benefits of project-based learning identified by this article are old news in a lot of progressive education research, but the actual implementation is a far more complex problem, and one that requires understanding the useful role of standardized testing as well as its disadvantages.

<comment><USER32> "Standardized tests try to package the assessment of a wide range of fundamental skills into a relatively contained, standardized format so that skills are evaluated relative to some clear standard"

Ultimately, what is the point, though? Almost every day there are articles about hiring on Hacker News. Not once have I read the advice to look at the results of the applicant in the standardized school tests. If the test results are not relevant in the real world, why cripple education by aligning it with the necessity to do such standardized tests.

I think at least for HN affine companies, "I have build a robot" would be a much better selling point than "I have high marks on the standard test". Intuitively somebody having too high marks might even raise my suspicions (little creativity and drive, just does what he is told without questioning it etc.). Which is of course unfair, some people are simply good. But it is an emotion that arises.

<comment><USER31> Standardized tests serve a number of roles in public education, very few of which relate to either enhancing or testing a student's ability to get a job.

The main applications relate to checking in on students' progress through the education system relative to their peers. It is also a way to compare the performance of particular groups of students (or schools) relative to others, which is very controversial, but obviously easier than trying to judge the quality of the robots they produce.

By far the greatest advantage of standardized tests over other assessment methods is that they scale beautifully. When you want to ask the question "how are we as a country/state/district doing compared to others", standardized tests provide a reasonably easy-to-interpret, reliable reference point. It's not just about what a test score says about an individual student (which ultimately is very little), but what the test scores indicate in aggregate.

<comment><USER32> None of these seem to benefit the actual students/pupils much, though? What would happen if kids could pick the schools they want to go to themselves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Having spent a decade of my life in for-profit education, specifically standardized test preparation (Sylvan, Kaplan, College Network, Grockit, Veritas Prep), I can say that there is more data that could be collected from tests. For example, instead of looking who got the "right" answer, you could look at which wrong answers people selected and why. For example, students who chose "A" probably have experience with microscopes, perhaps don't read instructions carefully.

More interestingly, you could learn a lot about a student's thought process by analyzing the time spent on a particular question, or whether they chose another answer choice before settling on one, or whether It's possible that the computer adaptive exams (GRE, GMAT, NCLEX, etc.) take this into account because the computer can collect this data, but paper and pencil tests simply cannot.

A student who chose answer choice "A" after 5 seconds is probably careless or overconfident, whereas a student who chose "A" after a minute of waffling between "A" and "C" possibly lacks confidence.

I think standardized tests could become a lot more useful if we could collect more data from them.

<comment><USER23> How would this data be used?

<comment><USER34> Ideally, as student feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Yes, they should be. It also would be nice if they had personalized attention of highly qualified education professionals, as well. But they don't. The unions, bureaucracy, politics, and funding is what it is.

<comment><USER36> I think you are unwittingly peddling an insidious idea that may be just as bad, if not worse, than standardized testing.

A "highly qualified education professional" is a disinterested drone whose only accomplishments were meeting the arcane state requirements for a teaching certificate. If you're really lucky, they might have been adept at stringing together a bunch of useless "research" conclusions into incoherent prose in order to impress an academic who hasn't taught in any meaningful sense for decades.

The qualities that make for a good teacher--intelligence, patience, curiosity, and creativity--are diametrically opposed to the qualities of a "highly qualified education professional."

<comment><USER37> I agree with you on the academia aspect, and it sounds like you are referring mostly to higher education, right? Or else, why would we want those from academia teaching our children in middle school and high school.

"intelligence, patience, curiosity, and creativity"

Are those really the qualities of a good teacher? In my mind, I don't really care of the teacher is curious or intelligent. I just want them to know how to deliver information to my child in the most efficient way possible. It would be nice if the children were engaged, and if the teacher had a clever way to even make it "fun" at times, great. But it's not a prerequisite.

<comment><USER36> >>> it sounds like you are referring mostly to higher education, right?

Actually, no. The qualifications for becoming a professor are generally: doctoral degree in subject + publications to name. At least where I live, the requirements for becoming a teacher are generally: approved course of study (in education, not necessarily subject areas) + baccalaureate degree + teaching certificate.

>>> I just want them to know how to deliver information to my child in the most efficient way possible.

Then what you want is Google, or Wikipedia, or a good textbook. When, however, it comes time to teach your child how to find the information, how to assess it critically, how to reason about it, and how to use it effectively, then you need a teacher.

Also, teachers play the important role of exposing students to ideas and information that they would not otherwise be searching for, and thus to cultivate previously unknown interests and foster an appreciation for learning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> By 4 poking speakers with pencils, by 7 burning raw sulphur to investigate the blue flame & burning holes in test tubes, by 8 taking photos of bugs & crystals down microscopes, by 9 re-wiring light switches into 240 volts, by 10 hacking electric motors with propellers, by 12 building & flying balloons & model aircraft & programming.

</comment><comment><USER39> Sorry, but I thought that was a great question. If you have ever used a microscope before it's obvious and if you have not you can still figure it out in under 30 seconds of logical thought.

<comment><USER40> It's also explicitly stated in the fourth caution item.

The author seems to be presenting the question as a boring context that students have to deal with, but there are plenty of tasks where some degree of self control is required to read and understand a few hundred words that aren't real exciting.

To me, the big problem with testing is that it is not particularly adaptive. Students that demonstrate a reasonable level of reading comprehension when they are 10 probably don't need to be evaluated for it 5 more times before they leave school (of course tests do get successively more difficult/higher level, but doing that in lockstep by age is a waste).

<comment><USER39> I agree, but assume standardized testing takes a full 2 days / year and you either do it every 4 years (3th, 9th, 11th) or every year. Well every year costs an extra 2 days on 3 / 4 years and assuming 180 school days a year that's (2*3/4)/180 = 0.83%.

So, yea it's probably not that useful, but if you want to get upset over something focus on the terrible quality of textbooks or something that can have a slightly larger impact. Even the school lunch program has a larger impact on student performance.

PS: Or just mandate that standardized testing does not count as part of the minimum required instruction time per year.

<comment><USER40> Good news is I'm not terrifically upset about it.

I did carefully leave "standardized" out of my comment. I have a problem with the whole process of present->practice->see what stuck. It has been the most practical method for teaching large groups of people for a long time, but I think there is a lot of potential in using adaptive testing to mechanize the evaluation and tracking of what students understand, which hopefully leads to students getting more and better personal attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> That photo says it all. Someone that's actually made something has confidence that cannot be instilled by positive, "you're a winner" affirmations. The individual is left with joy, not relief at having suffered through it.

The most important thing to be learned is that you can. And the most important thing that you can do is do.

</comment><comment><USER42> I find it hard to believe that the author had trouble with the question. The answer is provided perfectly in the supplied text. If I say that dogs bark when they are cold and then ask a five year old why dogs bark I think I'd be pretty disappointed if they couldn't regurgitate what I just said. Is it so different when written rather than spoken? Can we really be sure that this is a reading comprehension problem as opposed to a basic reading and language problem? I'd like to see if the students who got it wrong could even read the full text. If they can't read it then it is nothing to do with comprehension. They just can't read.

<comment><USER16> It's the way we're killing thinking in children.

If I say that dogs bark when they're cold and then ask a five year old why dogs bark, I'd expect something like, "when they're cold! and when they're angry! and when Amy [sister of this 5yo] steps on his tail, hahaha". Or whatever. Reality is not bound by what someone written or said few moments ago. If you want to test reading comprehension, you _have_ to control for prior experience in the subject which might be (and probably often is) greater than test author's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Just because you can compete in some rocket building competition or can program your Arduino to light an a 3x3x3 LED cube does not mean you have achieved a knowledge level to be successful in STEM. It's the details; I would think that our community would recognize that the most.

Programming a pong game would probably seem like genius level intelligence to many outsiders. Sure, most here don't think that, right? That doesn't mean you understand serious computer concepts and the sort of things that are Knuth's "Art," right?

It's fun to say "Who cares about solving these dumb, boring algebra problems, I can build a rocket by researching most of the things on the Internet." Sure someone who builds these kinds of things is probably more intelligent or perhaps had the chance to be more technical than your average everyday American but when you get into the details, I think we're talking about people that will successful in STEM and I just don't take seriously this romanticism of "project based learning."

I mean, just because you can follow directions and build a rocket, doesn't mean you're going to be fit to work as a Quant or something like that. This just seems obvious to me.

Of course, it goes without saying that you probably should have these kinds of projects. Definitely. These are great experiences. I doubt computer science would have even existed if people just had the attitude that "book learning" was for the birds or whatever and just "built stuff."

<comment><USER16> > Programming a pong game would probably seem like genius level intelligence > to many outsiders. Sure, most here don't think that, right? That doesn't > mean you understand serious computer concepts and the sort of things that > are Knuth's "Art," right?

But not programming a pong game and just learning from the book also doesn't mean you _understand_ serious computer concepts. I've seen examples of it at my university. "Understand" does not mean "repeat it on the next test", nor does it mean "repeat the definition you memorized from the book". It means being able to manipulate the concept in your mind, to infer consequences, to think of alternatives, and most importantly, to put it into use.

So my belief still is that bulding stuff correlates with understanding more, than book-learning alone. (I'm not saying builders don't learn - they do, but not what they're told when they're told, but what they need when they need it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> As a guy who's just been building a robot for a class instead of doing an exam - YES PLEASE!

But I'm probably not a "kid" anymore and college exams have never been all that standardized ...

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm opposed to standardized tests more than most people, however I have to take issue with this article. The author of this article stated early on that this was a 'reading comprehension question', and then goes onto to critique the question as if it was about learning about microscopes. He also says that he 'couldn't figure it out' by guessing. He should've tried reading.

As an aside, I did know the correct answer because I had been trained numerous times on microscope use. I didn't even look at the question until after reading the rest of the article. The test makers wouldn't have been testing my reading comprehension. I suspect this would be true of most people who got the correct answer. Interestingly, anyone who has been trained in taking such tests knows to read the answers first, as well as to guess the correct one. Then scan the actual question to find the relevant bit, as well as the 'trick', if it exists.

Like many people, I believe this author confuses learning with being a student. A student's job is to be a student, and that includes trying to score higher than average on tests by any legal means. Learning is something else altogether, and I have my doubts about being able to get far with that in an institutionalized setting.

<comment><USER46> I'm not too opposed to standardized tests, but I completely agree that they don't teach. That's what the rest of school is for. Saying "tests don't teach" is almost a tautology.

(Okay, when there is a reading comprehension section you will often learn something. That's just a bonus, though.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I should point out that several top tech innovators were trained, not in traditional boring schools, but in Montessori. These schools emphasize the Learn By Doing model without grades or tests.

Look at the minds produced: Larry Page and Sergei Brin of Google, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, etc.

[http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the- montessori-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori- mafia/)

</comment><comment><USER48> I think a lot of these comments are focusing on the wrong part of the text. I think what the author is really trying to convey is that taking standardized tests is not going to make a child want to grow up to build rockets or robots.

I'm a mechanical engineer and attended a technical university, and from my experience, most of the other students in technical fields are ones that grew up with an innate interest in building things and creating things. Not all children do things like that in their spare time. And not all parents give their children the opportunity to do things like that in their spare time.

Spending time in school taking standardized tests instead of performing scientific experiments and building things makes children bored with science and math. It is, very sadly, a wasted opportunity. Most children have no idea how exciting science and technology can be. All they know is sitting in class, reading books, working boring problems.

When a child gets to high school and starts applying (or not applying) for colleges, they are going to choose a subject that they remember being interesting. Most children that I have met do not find taking tests and reading about science to be interesting.

If children were more involved in the learning process through hands-on experiences, imagine the kind of excitement that would be generated among the young people. Imagine the kinds of things we would be capable of as a species if there were more people excited and invested in science and technology.

I realize that most of the readers of Hacker News were probably the children that grew up wanting to build and create. But there are so many children out there who need to be inspired in order to succeed, and those are the ones that are being failed by our flawed education system.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why does Slate magazine hate me so much that they made every possible attempt to move my eye away from the article I was trying to read?

</comment><comment><USER50> I liked the article but I couldn't take issue with the test question.

Is it a sign of a certain way of thinking that I read the test question, read the provided instructions, answered correctly, and then wondered how on earth anyone could miss a question where the answer is printed above?

I'm not being snarky or mean spirited, I honestly do not understand how anyone - whether they'd used a microscope or not - could look at a piece of provided text, look at a question regarding the text, and then answer incorrectly when a multiple choice selection is provided that is essentially snipped verbatim from the source text that addresses the question exactly. They literally give the answer. I used to wonder this when I took standardized tests as a kid, too.

Are they preying indecisiveness, or trying to make them feel it's a trick question? Maybe that's where I should be taking issue? That if they were familiar with a microscope they'd feel more confident in choosing the clear answer?

</comment><comment><USER51> Comments here so far seem to agree that the article goes too far, that we need both abstract and experiential learning in schools, and the article misunderstood the purpose of the microscope test question (reading comprehension).

Yes, we do need both abstract and experiential learning. But we need different ratios of them at different ages. Teenagers are much better at abstract learning than young children, and young children are much better at learning _skills_ than teenagers or adults. That is why young children can be piano prodigies, become multilingual, etc. There is nothing wrong with book learning, but it is currently close to 100% of the school day in our elementary schools. At least 50% of class time should be devoted to practicing skills at this age -- painting, singing, playing drums, athletics, building robots. With four years to learn something like physics in university, 100% book learning makes more sense.

</comment><comment><USER52> Kids should be building rockets and robots, not making iPhone apps.

</comment><comment><USER53> Not sure that the article conveys the message well, but I agree vehemently with the sentiment of the article's sub-heading (the title of the HN post). Standardized tests do a great job of ensuring we end up with standardized kids that will safely perpetuate the status quo.

<comment><AUTHOR> As a side note - I can tell Slate A/B tests their headlines because I originally read this on a mobile device with one header, then opened it on my desktop and it had a different header. The subheader was constant so I chose that as the title for this submission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> After attending the Seattle Mini Maker Faire this past weekend, all I can say is that I agree 100% with OP. You internalize the lessons much more thoroughly when you actively (rather than passively) participate in the learning process.

The kids were the happiest people at the Faire, because they hadn't convinced themselves yet that they couldn't build these things. They were excited. It was great to see.

Pessimism is for suckers :)

</comment><comment><USER55> Title is misleading. Articles seems to be picking on one particular standardized test. Does anyone want to invest in a startup that doesn't believe in collecting metrics let alone A/B testing? Why would anyone besides the teachers union advocate for no standardizing tests then? Sure testing sucks in a lot of places but that's not an argument against the idea of benchmarking.

<comment><USER16> It's not. You make what you measure. But it works both ways, because it's a feedback loop (otherwise measurements would be useless).

And standarized test are poorly calibrated to real understanding and makes the whole school system produce more and more dumb kids with each year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> How Schools Kill Creativity (2006) [http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html)

Summary: Around the world, our present education system was set up to meet the needs of the industrial revolution, it does not meet our current needs, and certainly won't meet our future needs.

</comment><comment><USER57> I agree to a point but I believe everything should be project base so people are given problems to solve in all subjects.

The reason for this is people get a better understanding of how to manage something properly and something that people can get stuck into rather than knowledge just being thrown at students without learning skills required to actually put the knowledge into action.

</comment><comment><USER58> I have a relevant story about the topic of this post. It's actually my life story.

When I was about 12 or 13 I dropped out of school.. I was too bored, too frustrated, and too unhappy to actually stomach it any longer: the unsightly pleasure adults took in dominating children, the teachers who knew less than I did but refused to admit it, the way smart kids often ended up at the bottom of the pecking order... The only thing I enjoyed was writing simple QBasic games for my friends and me to play.

After a protracted fight with my parents (I actually went on strike on the roof of our house) I got what I wanted and they let me drop out of school. This was probably the best single decision of my life, and the credit really goes to them for being brave enough to allow it.

I started out teaching myself C++ templates, and the basics of electronics. I got obsessed with high voltage, and started dumpster diving to find good parts. Once, after I took a (harmless) 40kV shock, my mom started to worry she'd come back from her teaching job to find me dead on the floor. I convinced her I knew the actual parameters of heart stoppage well enough to avoid this!

I built plasma globes and an improvised vacuum pump. I started rewiring our telephone lines. I made an amplifier. I built a coil gun and tuned it using my computer's sound card as a digital storage oscilloscope. I taught myself Python, and dived into the theory of digital signal processing.

I even had the good fortune of acquiring some Perl contract work through a family friend. Using the money to buy my own computer at 14 was probably the most satisfying experience of my life. Old school-friends would come to visit and oggle my enormous 21" CRT. That made me realize that I didn't have to follow the ordinary rules to survive in this world.

All the while I took distance education courses, a measure my parents insisted on (luckily). When I got high grades on A-level physics, I got the opportunity to attend university. Still a year young, I ended up studying pure math at the best math university on my continent (lots of Soviet bloc math emigres who moved to Africa for the sun).

The weirdest contradiction for me was hanging out with many of the other "nerdy kids" in math and physics who had gone the traditional route, and finding out that they really weren't all that interested in what they were doing. They seemed to be more consumed with perpetuating their high marks. Most frustrating of all was that achieving those high marks often boiled down to the most 'mercenary' kind of pillaging of old exam papers -- actual understanding didn't have much bearing on it.

Pure math was different -- you really had to think, be creative, and understand things to achieve good grades, at least in the more advanced courses. And sure enough, that was the one discipline I got very good grades in. But funnily enough, only when it got hard. For the first 2 years I didn't realize I had any interest in math at all.

By and large, my experience of formal education is best summed up by one little anecdote: I once handed in a 3rd-year physics practical in which I had taken an extraordinary large amount of care: I did the experiment several times because to better resolution on the spectrometer, I researched error propagation and did a more principled error analysis, I wrote it up carefully in LaTeX, and so on.

I got a mediocre grade for the practical. In fact, my explanation of how I had used a genetic algorithm to fit Gaussians to the spectrographic peaks had the word 'genetic' crossed out and replaced with 'generic' -- the ignorant tutor thought I had just misspelled it!

In contrast, a classmate put some last-minute work together that had (illegitimately) small error bars, and got 90%. At that point I lost interest in getting good grades in that subject, and stopped trying.

There is a happy ending: industry proved to be very meritocratic indeed. And my current job means I can actually bring all this random knowledge I have to bear, and bootstrap my way into new fields (like, recently, graphical models).

What are my conclusion here? I think the main conclusions are:

* Teaching yourself on your own has the benefit that you get used to doing what you do because you love it, not because people reward you for it. And this is what really matters in the end.

* Metrics to reward behavior will _almost always_ tend to corrupt the behavior they are meant to be promoting (this has been enshrined as <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbells_law>). Grades are _the_ best example of this.

</comment><comment><USER59> There are kids who want to build rockets, write plays and create art. Then there are kids who want to get jobs in IBM and HP.

I think we ought to give both these kids an equal opportunity to get what they want. It's wrong to assume that we all want to create; some of us are happy handling the running and the finances of someone else's creation.

</comment><comment><USER60> I agree with the article and would go further. In the modern era of information availability and the incredibly high quality of online courses and resources, school is obsolete for all but the really dumb kids that just aren't motivated because their parents are stupid or on drugs.

<comment><USER61> In the modern era of more and more families having only one child, I don't think replacing school by online learning at home is a good idea. Children need to be exposed to other children, kids with diverse backgrounds if possible.

Also, there is a time to be free and focus exclusively on what you like, but I'd rather have kids exposed to a variety of disciplines first.

Perhaps more importantly, I would not trust most parents to provide a good learning environment to their children, especially in poor families.

And online learning might be the most efficient for some students but I expect that other students benefit a lot from the personal contact with a teacher. Ideally we should be able to give each student what works best for her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> People are talking about how this test is biased against poor kids and how kids with no context won't understand. Does anyone here know of a middle school without microscopes? I went to a poor grade school and we had microscopes (granted they were old)

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady What is with the deluge of articles telling people what they should do? If people want to build rockets, robots, or learn to code they can. They should be doing what excites them and interests them whether thats science, writing, music, or coding.

</comment><comment><USER63> Answer is simple, a bigger population will require pruning and leaving few people behind, natural selection through standardized test. In a smaller popular, individuals will get to decide their interests and future.

</comment><comment><USER64> Well.. if 60% of pupils got the answer wrong, given the full explanation before the multiple choice answers, maybe it has more to do with reading ability than STEM disposition or method of questionning :/

<comment><USER16> Except that in real-life I wouldn't put the lens too close to the glass, because a) the microscope seems (by the description) to be able to crush the glass, and b) I wouldn't bet on myself remembering which way to turn the knob to raise the lens instead of lowering it.

IMO this is a thinking vs. saying what they want you to say problem. It pops up often when a kid has more experience with subject matter than the test author.

<comment><USER64> I can only speak from personnal experience: the first time I used a microscope I did break a glass by trying to zoom in first. I had no manual but I wouldn't have read it anyway (nowadays I do read instructions before using anything). When I read this particular article I "played" the game and answered correctly (hooray for me). I agree this kind of test has nothing to do with STEM because it is interchangeable and could be devised for any courses ; my point is that it's "just" a comprehensive reading test and if you fail it it means you fail at comprehensive reading which is one of the most basic skills one pupil should acquire. I agree it has nothing to do with validating specific STEM knowledge but nevertheless the explanations are correct and useful in the STEM field and understanding them is important. Now, if american science courses are only about those kind of tests it's a little bit concerning: Scoring A's in every courses just because you understand the questions versus scoring A because you understand the courses.

Not: I am not american so I don't know how education is organised in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> A standardized test is bureaucratic mechanism of control. It is a way to grade and rank a whole populace with a simple abstraction. They have nothing to do with learning.

</comment><comment><USER66> A lot of the discussion here focuses on critical thinking development which is an interesting topic. Does compulsory testing or even compulsory education in general do children any service in that regard? Are critical thinking skills better developed when a kid's education is self-directed? I think these are all fair questions.

Personally, I'm a fan of self-directed learning but that doesn't mean I'm right. Still, it strikes me that teaching people to think critically is like teaching them to be happy or to love. It seems kind of difficult to quantify.

<comment><USER66> Someone didn't like my comment. Fair enough. I'll put it another way.

Are children, left to their own devices, naturally deficient when it comes to critical thinking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> "American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests."

I agree on anything, but the first word. ;)

</comment><comment><USER68> Standardized tests aren't there to measure students, they are there to measure teachers.

</comment><comment><USER69> I think Udacity does a good job on this learning by making.

</comment><comment><USER70> Education is remarkably outdated.

</comment><comment><USER71> Article fails to take into account the full intellectual diversity of the students in the average classroom.

Some students need to build rockets and robots. Others need standardized tests to make sure they can read.</comment>


Show HN: Mirage – An interactive query explorer for Elasticsearch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/appbaseio/mirage <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN folks,

Elasticsearch has one of the most powerful query DSLs with support for 100+ search APIs ranging from full-text search to geo queries to range filters. At the same time, there is a very high learning curve associated with using Elasticsearch's JSON API.

Our goal with Mirage is to simplify the Elasticsearch APIs by providing GUI blocks for queries. It should also be an ideal resource to learn the ES query DSL as it transforms queries on-the-fly and comes with an in-app documentation browser.

Our current coverage of the DSL and future roadmap - [https://github.com/appbaseio/mirage#3-roadmap](https://github.com/appbaseio/mirage#3-roadmap).</comment>


Canadian Revenue Agency Sued after potentially 14,500 identity theft incidents - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cra-covid-19-benefit-cyberattacks-lawsuit-1.5705796 <comment><AUTHOR> Op here: original title would not fit, and extra information from subtitle included</comment>


Google Keep? It'll probably be with us until March 2017 - on average - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/22/google-keep-services-closed

<comment><USER2> Flawed methodology: The approach considers only services Google has closed. There are fairly obviously flaws in using this to predict how long you can expect a newly-introduced solution to be around.

</comment><comment><USER3> These kinds of posts (Google Reader being shutdown, how long will XYZ Google application run for) are starting to get old and redundant...</comment>


Firefox secretly tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6mvcol/firefox_secretly_tracks_users_with_google/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546)</comment>


How to post photos on the internet - <AUTHOR> http://colin-gourlay.com/how-to-post-photos-on-the-internet/

<comment><USER2> I can try these steps in my social media marketing technique. Really a nice idea....</comment>


European startups have been feeling the cash crunch for a long time - <AUTHOR> http://maxniederhofer.com/2011/10/13/us-tech-news.html

<comment><USER2> There's no VC or even VC mentality, especially in Italy. Partly it's due to the fact that it's more difficult to make it in a market that is segmented by language barriers, whereas in US you have a critical mass of customers that speak the same language. On the other hand you'll have more competition in US: but that's probably because VC there throw money at anything that moves.</comment>


Show HN: Firebase, a scalable real-time backend - <AUTHOR> http://firebase.com <comment><USER2> I used Firebase to build thereelbox.com, and enjoyed it thoroughly. It took 2-3 hours from starting into the documentation to completed/nobugs/pushed to production. Credit for that speed goes entirely to Firebase.

TheReelBox uses Firebase as a sort of API caching layer. This protects against rate limiting on the Rotten Tomatoes API, decreases request time by caching queries to the Fandango-via-YQL API, and eliminates an extra request per movie for Youtube trailers.

At the beginning, this system made it possible to host TheReelBox on my public dropbox folder, which made for really fast development. Since launch I've moved the static html and js to a micro AWS instance, but Firebase cleanly and transparently handles all the data.

Definitely recommend it.

<comment><USER3> Wow !! As a movie buff myself I think I'll be vising you site almost everyday now. This is what I used to do before:

      - Go to www.imdb.com
      - Click on 'See more movie showtimes' at the right.
      - On the next page, click on the 'Favorites' tab to choose a theater.
      - Go to maps.google.com and plan the route to the theater.

This is definitely going to save me at least a few hours every week while I check which movie is playing at what location.

And its got TRAILERS too !!! I'm addicted !!

<comment><USER2> Your comment makes me very happy, please enjoy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems slightly misleading with the pitch about "no servers". More like, "proprietary Javascript framework locked to proprietary hosted cloud service, no information about pricing".

Not that I begrudge anybody the chance to make some money, but along with Meteor I feel like there's a slightly deceptive nature to this kind of thing where the home page is emblazoned with "look, it's all free!" when in fact there's an unknown price to pay down the line.

<comment><USER5> Firebase is not really super complicated. It's just a database with a REST Api. I can not think of much more things they could add to lock you in more. I think if this becomes a thing, someone will make an opensource clone sooner or later.

About Meteor: There might be a lot of things wrong with Meteor (insecure by design), but this is not one of them: it's opensource and has a command which makes a self containing tar.gz bundle for you to deploy on your own server.

<comment><USER6> Firebase is a lot more than a database with a REST API. It pushes changes to you live, as they happen, in a way that is fast enough that you can use it for real-time gaming, collaborative whiteboards, and other apps could never work with a polling architecture.

It also does the work of managing distributed state of data across all of the clients and the server, and merging that data as needed to prevent conflicts in a distributed network like this. In fact, it allows you to run operations atomically across this distributed system -- operations that are latency- compensated, and work even in offline mode.

And finally, it can scale, with no work from the developer.

<comment><USER7> Yeah sure!

Suddenly there is a solution to distributed always consistent real time fully scalable reliable easy to use inexpensive database :)

Do you know this saying? "Nobody can give so much as I can promise you."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's my big concern: If my entire app is client-based JavaScript, wouldn't that make cloning my app as simple as copying all of the JavaScript and other asset files and then associating them with another firebase account -- perhaps modifying them some so they dont't get banned?

It seems like it lowers the barrier to competition a bit too much for me.

<comment><USER9> I think you're thinking a little too short-term here. It seems like a jump in technology that could completely change the way people build apps.

<comment><USER10> Glad to see interest in the idea. It's not much different from what people have been doing with projects like <http://couchapp.org> or <http://unhosted.org/> for some time.

Once you have a basic HTTP database API, you can do most of an app in client- side JS. Security is the hardest part to get right. In CouchDB we've tried to follow the web security model when it makes sense (single origin policy, oauth, etc).

CORS and WebSocket are both changing the web model, so it's not surprising to see the idea of a simple data API catching on as the web gets more power. Can't wait to see where this goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When the multi-player asteroids story was published, people were talking about Firebase, and having never heard of it, I started googling and found this: <http://www.cubeia.com/index.php/products/firebase> A scalable real-time game server with a html5/javascript front end. I still don't know which Firebase that game was built with. You guys have trademark issues.

<comment><USER12> MMOasteroids.com links to firebase.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I understand right: instead of having to worry about calling a REST API for a back-end data store I can just have JS objects persist automatically and synchronize between clients.

Dropbox for JS objects.

If I've got that right, I think this is totally awesome for front-end web devs and the most exciting backend-as-a-service out there.

</comment><comment><USER14> Another great step in the right direction.

That being said, I do believe the hardest part of all these attempts to abstract backends is authentication and security models. It seems to me that most of these services launch before figuring out that critical part of the puzzle.

<comment><USER15> We're using authentication in our Firebase app and it works wonderfully. Although all data is visible on the Firebase backend, we simply put pointer ids in Firebase, so no identifying data is publicly visible.

<comment><USER14> Care to elaborate? Firebase's FAQ seems to suggest that they're still working on a solution.

<comment><USER15> I believe they are working on a fully documented and stable auth solution; we're running something custom for now. Our whole Firebase namespace is read- only, so all our writing happens with a private key from our server. I think when the Firebase admin panel has more protection we can store more sensitive/identifiable data in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is cool. But can someone explain how data is secured in Firebase or Meteor?

From the Leader Board sample:

// Use setWithPriority to put the name / score in Firebase, and set the priority to be the score.

userScoreRef.setWithPriority({ name:name, score:newScore }, newScore);

How about I just change newScore to 100,000 in the debug window?

<comment><USER6> Good catch : ) We mention this briefly in our FAQ. We actually do have security in place (notice you can't enumerate other people's data for instance in our own tutorial), but the API is far from complete and we have no docs yet. There will be a full-fledged security model coming over the next few months.

<comment><USER17> That's only true until they launch a public product: at that point you can get access to or modify their data. It is downright irresponsible to launch a service like this that encourages people to use an insecure design for their service: security should be built in from the beginning, not tacked on afterwards, and even at the level of "this is a tutorial" it should be clear to the developer what they need to do to make it secure (not thrown into the advanced level of documentation, for example, like some companies do).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can't people find an alternative to the word "real-time" that hasn't already been used for 30 years to mean something entirely different? (As in, real-time systems, real-time operating systems, etc.)

I'm not trying to put down Firebase, I imagine it's great.

<comment><USER16> Sorry - I think "real-time web" is already in our lexicon.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_web#Real-time_search>

Just make sure people say _web_ after they say real-time and there should be no confusion.

<comment><USER18> I don't think that it's a lost cause. Mainly because calling these things "real-time" is technically incorrect. Real-time computing is already formally defined and well established.

Given the definition of real-time, one _could_ actually create a real-time web or a real-time search. So there is still cause for confusion--or, at least, technical incorrectness--if one uses that terminology.

<comment><USER16> Suggestions?

<comment><USER19> I'd like to see a term that emphasizes that what web developers consider real time is "so fast it looks instant to humans," rather than guaranteed low latency that another system can rely on (or whatever you consider the true definition of "real time" to be).

So maybe something like "blink speed." (Then we'd have blink speed apps on retina displays.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks very nice.

But just like meteor, doesn't have any authentication or authorisation, which sadly makes them just toys for now. Looking forward to both projects becoming usable.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd love to see the host-proof scheme that ZeroBin uses, so users can store sensitive data without having to trust Firebase. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832269>

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, im excited what people are doing out of this (especially in combination with other new tools like Meteor).

Seems there is a huge development ongoing to reflect new development and scaling practices...

EDIT: REALLY like the RT-Chat on the site - that is showcasing as it should be (and not just another "Demo" button).

<comment><USER6> Everyone has been building their own real-time solutions for the past few years and re-inventing the wheel over and over again. We saw ourselves doing it too, so we thought maybe we should do something about it! We think Meteor is really exciting as well, and should enable faster / better development of the types of apps that Firebase powers.

<comment><USER23> Meteor dev here. We're really excited about Firebase -- the time has come for realtime databases. Every Meteor app needs one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Tools used (from the chat):

Mongo for storage backend

Node.js client is Faye

Scala + Netty backend

custom JS client supporting "IE7+, Opera 10+, Safari / Chrome (recent versions), FF3.0+"

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing this! Too busy in chat to keep up with all the HN comments : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is the way to do demos - easy enough for a non-coder to use, but it explains and shows the internals for more experienced developers. Nice work!

<comment><USER6> Thank you! Glad you like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was part of the beta and really enjoyed working with Firebase it was like working only in the browser, i could forget there was a backend.

Once you start playing with it you realize that there are so many apps that can be built.

the team has a few things to work on, and trust me many of us in the beta flushed a lot of those out. they have their work ahead of them. what's there is polished and ready for use. give it a try. use this as a chance to explore what can be done when you can forget about the backend.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm a non-coder.

A very simple guide to make a very simple, understandable web-app would be the killer feature for me.

There is a tutorial for a chat-app but that's way over my head(I of course get how to put in the code, I just don't understand it (REST, roots, references etc). If I could be shown how to make something insanely simple, and I actually understood how it worked, it'd lead me on to the next thing. A collaboration with codecademy might be the thing.

So much potential.

<comment><USER28> I'm the same way and have thought about this concept... I'm not even completely sure exactly what Firebase is but it sounds similar to that idea just requires more coding experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What is the difference between this and let's say 'Meteor'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. Meteor is an application framework, like Ruby on Rails. Firebase is a database, like MySQL.

We both think that application development is going to radically change in the future and we're both building products that promote a new way of developing apps. We're stoked about Meteor and see our products as very complementary.

<comment><USER30> Could Firebase be used as a database for Meteor? (i.e. replacing Mongo)

<comment><USER31> yes. There is a node.js library for Firebase that uses websockets as a transport layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This looks awesome -- a better option than an api-only Rails backend. Realtime pub/sub is also a big plus. Security is a concern with any 3rd party storage, but most uses I can think of wouldn't store missile launch codes in here anyway..

It's also worth pointing out that Firebase grew out of Envolve which supported millions of users, so you know these guys can handle scale.

</comment><comment><USER33> This looks really good. It seems to be very similar to the Hydna app that was on HN yesterday. For the rest of us, that has to be a win. Can't wait to see how things develop with both companies now!

(Absolutely loved the interactive tutorial. Brilliant way to show off the service!)

</comment><comment><USER34> A real-time client-side library that ties in to their database hosting service, basically.

Also, if you want to have any non-realtime parts of your web app that do server-side processing of data then it looks like you have to use Node.js to talk to Firebase, as there's no REST API for it that I can see. I guess they don't mind because they're trying to get you to do all data processing in the client anyway.

Definitely need security and permissions. How do I make sure only registered users of my site can access chat? How do I make sure only admin users can create new chat threads? From my brief reading it looks like all clients can see everything in the database and modify it all. Am I wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can find our REST API docs here: <http://www.firebase.com/docs/rest- api.html>

We're definitely working on security full speed. We have some basic security but it's not ready yet. If you'd like to beta test it, please email us: email@example.com

You can check out our FAQ for more info: <http://www.firebase.com/faq.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> on a sidenote: I wouldn't do business with or trust my data to a company that hides their actual address behind whois protection

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. This was on while we were in stealth. I've removed the whois protection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Firebase, Burn your servers, you don't need them any more. Firebase is for app developers that don't want to worry about building real time scalable back ends.

<comment><USER36> Random aside, but when I first saw this comment (it was originally downvoted, IIRC), it sounded like an incoherent insult directed at Firebase for catering to "noob" developers; I only realised that you meant it as a potential marketing line after reading a bit of your comment history :P. I think a colon in place of a comma at the start would have been more clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What are the main differences between this and Meteor? What a strange coincidence that two nearly identical platforms launch within days of each other.

</comment><comment><USER38> I just asked them twice on their chat to describe their infrastructure and they won't do it, at least yet.

I realize this is in beta, and it's early, but am I the only one who would not trust my data to a service where I can't get at least some idea of how they're actually functioning behind the curtain?

</comment><comment><USER39> A few weeks ago, I wrote about (and presented at RubyNation) on why I think a "dumb backend" is a really bad idea: [http://planscope.io/blog/2012/03/25/rails-is-more-than-an- ap...](http://planscope.io/blog/2012/03/25/rails-is-more-than-an-api/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Phenomenal. I've been waiting to try this for months! It looks terrifically easy.

</comment><comment><USER41> What I like most about Firebase so far compared to Meteor, is that I can actually read about Firebase and its excellent documentation from any machine with any web browser!

Well done, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's been a good week for the real-time-web.

We might need a snappier name though, because this sort of real time is a lot more real time that the type of real time people are already used to.

<comment><USER43> Live-time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I couldn't find any (easily accessible) info about what it actually uses to communicate. Is it long-polling, websockets, something else?

What kind of browser compliance is there?

<comment><USER6> It uses a variety of techniques, depending on what is available on the client. When possible we use web sockets in the browser, but have other methods we can use when they're not available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Congrats on the launch of Firebase and absolutely love the code demo; it hooks you in.

At the end of the demo you are asked if you'd like early access. Definitely.

</comment><comment><USER46> For those interested in this kind of service there are a variety of others, including our own (spire.io), as well as Pusher, PubNub, and others.

</comment><comment><USER47> Really interesting idea, look forward to giving it a whirl in a moment.

Quick question, are you affiliated with firebase.co? They seem to be in a similar field.

</comment><comment><USER48> This should play beautifully with client-side JS web app frameworks like AngularJS where the JSON models are 2-way bound to the views.

</comment><comment><USER49> Fantastic job. This looks phenomenal, James! I can't wait to find an awesome project to put this to good use. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER50> "real-time" has a very specific meaning when it comes to software, don't dillute it please.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is going to revolutionize the way apps are built.

</comment><comment><USER51> Looks similar to what Meteor was trying to achieve?

</comment><comment><USER52> Firebase will turn into a chat company :p

</comment><comment><USER53> congrats, james. i'll whip something up for teamly soon enough:)

</comment><comment><USER54> Simply Amazing!!

</comment><comment><USER55> Great!

</comment><comment><USER56> I think it's overrated. :/

</comment><comment><USER57> Can someone explain what kind use-cases there are for a database where the client can read and write directly against the database? CouchDB could do this (via CouchApp), but I bet not many people do this because it's bad from security and scaling standpoint and I think there aren't that many types of apps that can be created without a proper back-end.</comment>


Apache Flink - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apache/flink <comment><USER2> Apache Flink, Flume, Storm, Samza, Spark, Apex, and Kafka all do basically the same thing. I feel like this is a bit overboard. And this is before we talk about the non-Apache stream-processing frameworks out there.

* Apache Flink is an open source stream processing framework

* Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available software for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log data.

* Apache Storm is a distributed stream processing computation framework

* Apache Samza is an open-source near-realtime, asynchronous computational framework for stream processing

* Apache Spark is an open-source distributed general-purpose cluster-computing framework.

* Apache Apex is a YARN-native platform that unifies stream and batch processing.

* Apache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform

<comment><USER3> Not quite. All of these are open-source projects but they are very different in many aspects:

* Apache Flink

Sophisticated stream processing framework with focus on robustness (managed memory) and correctness (exactly-once semantics)

* Apache Flume

Tailored towards log data.

* Apache Storm

First stream processing framework. Legacy.

* Apache Samza

Only used at LinkedIn. Tight to Hadoop's YARN.

* Apache Spark

Only great in batch processing.

* Apache Apex

Dead project. Tight to Hadoop's YARN.

* Apache Kafka

A distributed message queue with simple stream processing built on top via the Confluent Platform.

<comment><USER4> Nice list. There are also non-Apache projects like NATS, hosted by CNCF.

Here are the 19 streaming and messaging projects and products that CNCF is tracking: [https://landscape.cncf.io/category=streaming- messaging&forma...](https://landscape.cncf.io/category=streaming- messaging&format=card-mode&grouping=category)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Controversial opinion here, but all of these distributed streaming architectures are massively overused. They certainly have their place, but you probably don't need them. I see it all the time with ML work. You wind up using a cluster to overcome the memory inefficiency of Spark, when you could have just used a single machine. For example, I've done huge graph clustering models on a single machine just by being smart about memory consumption. It would have taken an enormous and expensive Spark cluster.

<comment><USER6> This has been my experience, too. I worked at just one place that had a _really_ good handle on high-volume, high-velocity streaming data, and they didn't use Flink or Storm or Kafka or anything like that. They mostly just used the KISS principle and a protobuf-style wire format.[1]

There is definitely a point where these sorts of scale-out-centric solutions are unavoidable. Short of that point, though, they're probably best avoided.

[1]: (It's truly amazing how many CPU cycles you can reclaim just by removing branch instructions from your message deserialization code.)

<comment><USER7> See McSherry et al, _" Scalability! But at what COST?"_

[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos15-paper- mcsherry.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the easiest way to get started with trying Apache Kafka/Spark/Flink on the cloud? If I want to try out Redis there's RedisLabs, CloudAMQP for RabbitMQ, Compose for Postgres/Redis/RabbitMQ, offerings like Google Cloud SQL/MemoryStore and AWS RDS/ElastiCache, etc. Where do I go for some easy Apache deployments?

<comment><USER9> Google cloud has "one-click" installation of integrated 3rd-party solutions. Never tried that though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> AWS lets you uplod Flink programs to process to Kinesis streams, and Google Cloud also has support for Apache Beam

<comment><USER11> Yeah, or any other input. I don't think it's tied explicitly to Kinesis. This is definitely easier than other ways to deploy! EMR also has Flink as an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Prerequisites for building Flink: Unix-like environment (we use Linux, Mac OS X, Cygwin) Java 8 (Java 9 and 10 are not yet supported)"

 _Sigh_ is too much to ask for proper crossplatform support? And when the hell they will add support for recent versions of Java????

<comment><USER13> Pretty much all of these Hadoop-adjacent things are more or less Linux only, and certainly unix-y-thing-only. What other platform do you want to run it on?

<comment><USER12> Uhh, I don't know... maybe windows?

heck, hadoop itself runs fine on windows 10 [[http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-project- dist/ha...](http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop- common/SingleCluster.html)]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone have experience running in production?

If you have an article about using it or slides please send links.

<comment><USER15> Not sure why the Flink github site got linked. Here's a list of companies using it in production, with links to details.

[https://flink.apache.org/poweredby.html](https://flink.apache.org/poweredby.html)</comment></comment>