Project Euler vs Khan Academy: the future of online learning

Khan academy has been all over the news these days. My feelings about his work can best be summed up by Frank Noschese’s wonderful posts on the topic, so rather than rehash all the problems I have with Khan’s vision of education, I’ll just link to Frank’s not so final remarks about Khan Academy, which are a must read.

But as much as I find flipped classrooms and Khan’s error ridden videos problematic, I keep coming back to the idea that there must be some ways to leverage the internet to fundamentally change learning, right? If Khan isn’t the revolution we were hoping for, what is?

I think I’ve found a few hints in Project Euler, which was recently profiled in the Atlantic Monthly in the excellent article by James Somers:

How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code. This is definitely worth reading—finally an educational reporter who gets it—he’s even read Lockhart’s Lament (pdf).

Project Euler is a series of mathematical puzzles, designed to be solved by writing short programs. Here’s the first puzzle:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Notice this puzzle is accessible to anyone; no need to watch a five minute video to understand how to “do” this problem. Instead, it instantly provokes the reader into thinking about how to solve it, searching for patterns, thinking about writing a program, and wanting to learn the coding techniques the need to implement it.

Here’s a great quote from the article:

The problem itself is a lot like Lockhart’s triangle question — simple enough to entice the freshest beginner, sufficiently complicated to require some thought.

What’s especially neat about it is that someone who has never programmed — someone who doesn’t even know what a program is — can learn to write code that solves this problem in less than three hours. I’ve seen it happen. All it takes is a little hunger. You just have to want the answer.

That’s the pedagological ballgame: get your student to want to find something out. All that’s left after that is to make yourself available for hints and questions. “That student is taught the best who is told the least.”

To me, this approach stands in stark contrast to Khan Academy. Khan’s problems make your classic textbook problems look interesting. From the time I’ve spent playing around, it is a feat of tedium tolerance just to be able to complete 10 of them in a row. Here’s a sample from “Average Word Problems”

Gulnar has an average score of 87 after 6 tests. What does Gulnar need to get on the next test to finish with an average of 78 on all 7 tests?

I’ll save how much I dislike the very premise of this question as the antithesis of learning. Worse is that Khan shows you exactly how to do this very problem in the “averages” video. And once I get this problem right, I have to suffer through 9 more that are all the same (all focused on grades…hmm). I think it’s safe to say that by the time you get through 9 of these, the only thing that could motivate you to keep going and do the 10th is earning the badge.

Contrast this with Project Euler. Once you solve a problem, you get to access the discussion forums of that particular problem, and that’s where the real fun begins. You’ll find posts from people all over the world describing how they solved the problem in all sorts of ways you never thought of, using languages you might never have seen before. You will want to go back and find ways to simplify, beautify and speed up your program. It’s a true opportunity for learning. And the next problem you face isn’t a rehash of the previous one, it’s a new adventure waiting to be unlocked. As the author writes, this really is a wonderful way to learn a programming language, and I can attest to its addictive nature.

the article describes this addictive nature well:

The first is that it’s naturally addictive. Computers are really fast; even in the ’80s they were really fast. What that means is there is almost no time between changing your program and seeing the results. That short feedback loop is mentally very powerful. Every few minutes you get a little payoff — perhaps a small hit of dopamine — as you hack and tweak, hack and tweak, and see that your program is a little bit better, a little bit closer to what you had in mind.

It’s important because learning is all about solving hard problems, and solving hard problems is all about not giving up. So a machine that triggers hours-long bouts of frantic obsessive excitement is a pretty nifty learning tool.

So here’s one more thing I think Khan Academy gets wrong. It focuses on answers and explanations, and settles for crappy problems that do little more than test whether you were paying attention to the video. It’s exactly like the worst features of textbook instruction—the text filled with bold faced definitions, followed by the fill in the blank questions that are designed to see if you can find the bold faced words to show you “understood.” And the superficial motivation it uses, badges and gold stars, pales in comparison to the deep curiosity and community that drives people to progress through Project Euler.

Here’s how Somers describes the Project Euler community:

Even if you’re not a programmer, it’s worth solving a Project Euler problem just to see what happens in these forums. What you’ll find there is something that educators, technologists and journalists have been talking about for decades. And for nine years it’s been quietly thriving on this site. It’s the global, distributed classroom, a nurturing community of self-motivated learners — old, young, from more than two hundred countries — all sharing in the pleasure of finding things out.

So what will it take to improve online instruction beyond Khan Academy and the current obsession with classroom flipping? I think Project Euler gives a good hint. Focus on the questions, not the answers. Drop the superficial badges, and build a real community that encourages learning. If you want a few more ideas, I’d suggest checking out Jerrid Kruse’s excellent post, What should we flip?

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