Teachers Who Do Not Answer Questions

Rogelio Valdés

Oct 2, 2019

See the Video Game Programming Course at robinacademy.com/vg

It was my first week of classes at university. I had always said I could study anything except engineering, even though both of my parents are engineers. Maybe that is exactly why. But one month before starting college, I changed my mind and chose a new engineering program that Tec de Monterrey had just opened.

Every student in the Innovation and Development Engineering program had to take a first-semester course called "FisMat," a combination of physics and mathematics. I had always been good at math and science, but they were never my favorite subjects, so I did not pay much attention when people told me about the class.

The course always took place in a lab and was led by one physics teacher and one math teacher. There was rarely a direct explanation from them. Instead, each session began with a question and an experiment that would help us find the answer.

How can we predict the position of an object as it falls?

We had sensors, computers, and other measuring tools available to solve the problem. At the end of every class, each team had to present its experiment and the conclusions it had reached.

I remember many classmates getting frustrated because they were used to memorizing a formula and applying it to exercises. But here, no one gave you the recipe. You had to create it yourself, and every question we asked was answered with another question.

> Student: Do I need to take a derivative with this data?

> Teacher: I do not know. Why do you think that?

A teacher who does not solve your doubts? It sounds ridiculous, but I learned far more in that class than I ever would have learned through a traditional methodology. We learned to defend our theories in front of our classmates, but also to question other people’s ideas, and especially our own.

We never used a textbook. We had to create our own methods to reach the solution. One day, one of the teachers wrote every formula and conclusion we had arrived at on our own during class. He showed us that we had not reinvented the wheel. Everything we had defined had already been described by Isaac Newton almost 300 years earlier. The only difference was some of the notation.

We left that day feeling like geniuses who could define and explain anything with mathematics. After all, even if we were not the first to do it, we had followed the same type of reasoning Newton once used. Personally, I developed a real interest in science and felt once again like that curious child who discovers something new every day.

I still consider that one of the best classes I have ever taken. It taught us how to think our way toward our own solutions instead of memorizing formulas. In the long run, that is what really matters, because out there in the real world, there is no instruction manual.

This course used the Socratic method so that we could solve problems ourselves. In future blog posts I will talk more about this methodology and how we have started to apply it in Robin courses.

See the Video Game Programming Course at robinacademy.com/vg