Suggest we coalesce around principles to use when creating content

[edmundsj]

I think it would be a good idea to agree on a set of principles to use for the educational philosophy of this site. We can use these as a guide when writing, and can use it as criteria to easily find content that should be revised and improved. Here's a starting proposal. There's some redundancy and I'm just proposing this as a starting point. Citations and evidence should also be incorporated.

1. Specific before general
Students don't learn by being given the most general (and most powerful) equations and procedures, they learn by generalizing specific (and less powerful, and less general) procedures themselves. Pattern recognition is one of the greatest human strengths, memorization of general formulae is not. Specific examples should be used to illustrate general principles, and then those general principles can be outlined.

2. Concrete before abstract
Similarly, presenting concrete examples, rather than abstract ones (so "a voltage source with voltage 1V" instead of "a voltage source of voltage V_0). Abstractions are powerful, but should be taught secondarily once concrete examples are used.

3. Simple before complex
When teaching a new concept, the simplest possible example with the fewest extraneous details should be presented. When introducing resistors, we should talk about a single resistor instead of 2 or 3 (or, god forbid, an arbitrary number) of resistors.

4. Concise over verbose
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell."
— "Elementary Principles of Composition", The Elements of Style

5. Tell a story, don't present facts
Humans don't remember facts. Facts aren't interesting. No one cares about your facts. Humans remember, and learn from stories. Content should be a narrative centering around a few core ideas (for example: in semiconductor physics, the central question we are trying to answer is 1. how many charge carriers are in the semiconductor and 2. where are they and how do we move them?). Similarly, content should use personal/historical stories whenever possible, should make use of real-world examples, and should always build on itself.

6. Use what you teach immediately
"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." From Gurlyand's Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov
This means that examples should immediately follow new concepts, and new concepts should build on old concepts to reinforce them and make use of them.

[edmundsj]

I want to add something about including reference sections / take home ideas at the beginning or end of each lesson / article. This allows for easy reference when looking back at content (which is a primary advantage of the written word over spoken). Not sure how to articulate that.

[edmundsj]

I'm also not sure how to handle derivations. I, myself, am usually unsatisfied if I don't know where something comes from or how it is derived, but I also know that, pedagogically speaking, it's usually not a good idea to lead with derivations unless they are straightforward and convey intuition about what's really going on.

I vote we add these, based on your comments and some of my ideas.

7. Make stuff easy to find.
Put the core ideas at the top and the bottom of the page ("Top line" and "Bottom line"). Add references at the end of each big section (chapter?) for anybody who wants to go deeper.

8. Always go through the derivation.
If you don't know how it's derived, you don't know how it's defined. If you don't know how it's defined, you can't do jack squat. If the algebra gets out of hand, fine, stick it in an appendix. But it's gotta be available. Otherwise somebody will try to use this derivation in a situation where it's not defined/valid, and then you're in a whole world of hurt.

9. Motivated over unmotivated.
Why should we care, anyway? Why can't I just have my simulator do everything for me? In the words of Stuart G. Walesh, "The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a challenge and opportunity beyond imagination."
In order to use that brilliance, you've got to motivate why doing something this way is better than every other way. The computer doesn't define the physical world or the math behind it: we do.

(9 could probably be more concise,.)

[edmundsj]

I merged 1 and 2, 3 and 6, added 7, 8, 9 to the README. See commit 2374dfb
Leaving this open for further discussion and revision.

[edmundsj]

Merged principles 4 and 7, they are basically saying the same thing. See commit 8b8b2a4

Another thing that might be useful.

As somebody that gets mired in the details long before I actually get to use them, I think it's worth having some overarching example to relate everything back to. For example, in the analog circuits course, I might use the video amplifier at the end as my overarching example. If you can solve this video amplifier circuit and get it correct, you've not only learned how to do circuit analysis pretty darn well, you've also got a better idea of what's going on than anybody who would just simulate it.
Heck, they'll know way more about circuits than I do; that's for sure!