TITLE: The Workaday Byproducts of Striving for Higher Goals
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 03, 2013 3:17 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Why set audacious goals? In
his piece about the Snowfall experiment,
David Sleight says yes, and not simply for the immediate end:
The benefits go beyond the plainly obvious. You need good R&D
for the same reason you need a good space program. It doesn't just
get you to the Moon. It gives you things like
memory foam, scratch-resistant lenses, and Dustbusters.
It gets you the workaday byproducts of striving for higher goals.
I showed that last sentence
a little Twitter love,
because it's something people often forget to consider, both when
they are working in the trenches and when they are selecting
projects to work on. An ambitious project may have a higher risk
of failure than something more mundane, but it also has a higher
chance of producing unexpected value in the form of new tools and
improved process.
This is also something that university curricula don't do well.
We tend to design learning experiences that fit neatly into a
fifteen-week semester, with predictable gains for our students.
That sort of progress is important, of course, but it misses out
on opportunities for students to produce their own workaday
byproducts. And that's an important experience for students to
have.
It also gives a bad example of what learning should feel like, and
what it should do for us. Students generally learn what we teach
them, or what we make easiest for them to learn. If we always set
before them tasks of known, easily-understood dimensions, then
they will have to learn after leaving us that the world doesn't
usually work like that.
This is one of the reasons I am such a fan of
project-based computer science education,
as in the traditional compiler course. A compiler is an audacious
enough goal for most students that they get to discover their own
personal memory foam.
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