Lessons Education Can Take From Slide Rules and LISP
Slide-rules and technology for the future of education.
Sat around a wooden table, with brown cloth upholstered chairs I remember watching my father work on the family company’s tax returns.
In the background my mother prepared dinner for the four of us. On this particular day I seem to remember it was stuffed marrow.
The memory is very clear to me, as this was the day I learned about slide-rules.
Slide rules ruled.
Slide rules are fasciantingly intricate sliding instruments which at first glance seem similar to the everyday ruler you might already be familiar with. Unlike these, slide-rules allow the trained user to conduct sophisticated mathematical operations, including square roots, cube roots, logarithmic and trigonometric equations by simply sliding pieces of the ruler backwards and forwards.
My father, being a draughtsman by trade, used these device day in and day out, and even though personal calculators had begun their meteoric rise in 1972, he refused to adopt this new fangled technology and in our kitchen in 1984 I learned how to use this “ancient” piece of technology.
I’m somewhat embarrassed to say the memory of the day lasted longer than my skill, and if like me, you need a refresher on how to use a slide rule, this is a useful video.
Technology moves faster than education practices
Whilst my father had learnt the skill in his early training, and used it throughout his architectural career, I learnt and promptly forgot the skill, having never needed it in any real life or academic setting.
As I moved into the higher years of my education, I also learnt what are now pseudo-redundant skills, and many of these are still being taught today. Whilst an understanding of the fundamentals still underpins comprehension and utility, with so much technology available at our finger-tips or simple utterance, tomorrow’s jobs will require greater understanding of how to create, control and use technology.
“Hey Siri! What is the square root of 484?”
New foundations
Schools and colleges are no longer just preparing students for standard, 9–5 employment in fields like hospitality or accounting; they’re being tasked with the difficult job of preparing students for unique jobs that might not even exist yet.
The foundational skills of tomorrow’s vocations include skills seen as optional during my education. These will include workable knowledge of information technology, programming and coding, cyber security, and, computational ethics across nearly every role.
Principles and practice
It was around the same time that I was taught how to use a slide rule that I got my first computer, the BBC Micro, and the world of programming opened up. The language back then was BASIC and I learnt it by copying programmes from magazines one character at a time (…time and time again!).
From this home-study it was another eight or so years until I began any formal software development education. At university the pace was rapid, C, Pascal, LISP, Prolog, Matlab and …. assembly language! Then in my first jobs, C#, Pascal2, Delphi, C++ and of course, the most rapidly growing language of the time, Java.
After a career foray into marketing and sales that lasted a coupe of decades, the basics of what I learnt are still there and enabled me to pick up Python with ease, and it is this “muscle memory” and logic ability that schools and colleges need to be helping students with from earlier ages.
I don’t think it is a hyperbole to say that nearly all jobs of the future will require some level of coding. That could be simple if-this-then-that type of logic (see below) through to AI algorithm tuning, and quantum.
Like LISP and Python in my lifetime, the tools used tomorrow are likely to resemble, but be quite different to those available to students today. However the further through the education system you go, especialliay vocational-focused colleges, the closer to the industrial status quo you need to be.
If you are responsible for preparing students for entry into the job market in the next few years, you should be looking to make sure they are learning skills, languages and systems that are widely used and increasing in demand.
Next, I’ll look at some of the technologies that are in both demand and easy for colleges to embrace. Read more here …
