Posts from 2026
Newest first. Every post is listed on the archive page.
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14 October 2026 — Asking a chatbot to confirm a proof A chatbot log can show a student challenge a mistake, but it cannot show what they did before the first prompt. Two summers of perturbed assignments in discrete mathematics made that limit clearer to me. In two interviews from the later study, students described doing proofs first and turning to AI for certainty. I still need the written work and coded logs to determine what checking actually took place.
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8 October 2026 — Learning to learn, and what games are good for A change to League of Legends replay downloads got me thinking about learning how to learn. Factorio and Rocket League gave me short, concrete experiences of getting better at something. A game-learning study makes me question how much of that improvement I can credit to the games.
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7 October 2026 — Why people walk looking at their phones Walking to a lecture hall an hour early, reading email I could have read sitting down, I started wondering why a freed-up attention gets filled that way. ICAP tells me scrolling is the engagement least likely to teach me anything, and says nothing about why it is the easiest to start. My working answer is context: a familiar walk builds an expectation, so a small departure from it is worth noticing, and an app replaces the context faster than one can form. This is a line of thinking that needs a literature review, including work that would contradict it.
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2 October 2026 — Thinking about curriculum as a knowledge graph I want to explore how a curriculum might help students build connections between knowledge components, and how working through concrete problems might make those connections easier to draw. Starting with cats and multisets, I work through a graph account of remembering and an experience connecting interpolation to recurrence relations. These are provisional ideas that need a literature review, including work that could contradict them, before I use them to design a combinatorics unit.