Can We Make Teaching Great Again ?


Jaak Henno, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Hannu Jaakkola, Tampere University, Pori, Finland
Jukka Mäkelä, University of Lapland, Finland

This presentation is on-line at http://staff.ttu.ee/~jaak.henno/Mipro2023/

People in this room are obsessed with LEARNING


In last ten years interest to LEARNNG in Google search has grown over ten times

Nobody claims that results in schools and universities have improved ten times

The COMPUTER LEARNING is a program and program creators should know how it works

- computer learning is pure statistics

Unfortunately nobody does not understand what these programs do...

AI = Artificial Idiotism ???

For HUMAN LEARNING we have the transform theory :

1: We are smart, we observe common features in different processes, events, images

2: We look for similar explanation of those common features in different processes

3: We understand better these (seemingly) different processes
- we have LEARNED something


At the end of May many people gather on the last week of May to Opatija
and talk, talk, talk ...


At the same time a corner of a lake near Tallinn becomes full of fish -
nerest, nerest, nerest ...

There is a common fearure: both groups are concerned with their future and try to improve it ...

Currently there are problems with both pre-conditions of learning:
smartness and
ability to find explanations

Smartness is measured by IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests

The IQ tests were introduced in 1905 by French psychologist Alfred Binet
to find proper class for children who previously did not attend school

Currently there are tens of different IQ tests

IQ tests consider different cognitive abilities:

Which of the following does not belong here: “Person, Woman, Man, Whale, Camera. TV”?

What are the first two members of the sequence:
x1,x2,5,6,7,8,11,12,13,14,...

Find suitable:

IQ tests have been used with similar contingents (e.g. military conscripts) for many years

Comparing these results the American-New Zealand psycholog James R. Flynn found that IQ scores increased during 1960-1975 from 99,4 to 102 in all countries for which data existed ('the Flynn effect') and started then to decrease until 99.2 in 1989
Some studies claim that it is still decreasing
are we getting dumber?

Decline of IQ has been explained with "environmental factors",
i.e. is not (yet) genetically encoded in our childrens

Some researches claim that IQ improves with education.
The common measure of 'school' education is the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test for 15-year-olds. .


In the last test in 2022, PISA scores went sharply down in all OECD countries

Vocabulary of U.S. adults declined in 1970-2010 for all educational levels but most among those with a bachelor's and graduate degrees

The most noticeable change in "environmental factors" is rapid increase in use of robots, computers and emphasis on STEM education

Abstract reasoning, text (music/art etc) creation are receiving less attention -
we do not need this when we allready have chatGPT and other fluent 'content creators' !

But these 'fluent chatterers' do not understand a word what they output - they consider only order of symbols ...

When importance of DATA become understood, everyone started to restrict access to their data

Human-generated data belongs to creator (copyright)

chatGPT and other 'fluent chatterers' used human-generated data without any indication to origins

Several newpapers, authors, publishers etc have sued OpenAI and Microsoft for use of their work

Programming is rapidly becoming more complex ...


It is again end of May and people speak in Opatia ...


more and more...


This prediction' is based on a small program

This 18-line program imports recursively many modules. All together are loaded 864 modules, 476107 lines of Python code

The 18 lines grow 26450 times !
Rapid increase of (mostly useless) information acts like the Denial-Of-Service attack in Internet: - flooding the target with superfluous requests for attention prevents its normal work, forcing to follow attacker commands.

People who constantly check their smartphones are clearly already ‘pwned’; ‘pwned’ students (in programming class) can only senselessly googling and add to their project all libraries what they see in some other project in blind hope – ‘maybe this works’

In computer networks superfluous requests are cancelled by firewalls

In scools and universities the role of firewall is on teachers

Teachers should organize proper flow of new information:
- it does not exceed the input capability of students
- everything essential is covered

Courses should be difficult, but manageable

The "Game Programming" course covered in 13 lessons the whole spectre of browser games, from shooting-jumping (Mario!) to 3D games, where the environment (skybox) modelled the university campus

No lectures, in every lesson students had to implement a new game following presented tutorial

The average assessment of the course from students was 4.87 (in scale 0..5)

Sportsmen know that becoming an Olympic Champion or establishing a World Record requires hard training - day after day...

In intellectual competition the same principle holds - nobody can become a Nobel laureate or establish a successful company on 'snake oil' - chatGTP, influencers etc

Intellectual achievements are based on the same as physical achievements - You, your body and mind, only they know the TRUTH

We are beginning to understand dangers of 'Information Age'

We make 35,000 choices a day on average (Harward)

Average teenager checks his phone 2000 times a day

In many countries smartphones are banned in schools

The Buxton school in Massachusetts, USA banned smartphones in the whole campus area and replaced with a simple “dumb” phones with black and white screens which can’t load modern applications

The whole university (also students!) like this 'new world order'

Computers, smartphones, chatGPT may help humans to use their intellect, but they can not think

chatGPT can produce fluent text on several natural languages, but does not understand a word - it considers only order of symbols

>We need to go through the same traditional path as our preceeding generations:
learn, drill, memorize, repeat...

learn, drill, memorize, repeat...

"Never just follow the crowd. Always make up your own mind." (Margaret Thatcher)

That's all...
Available on-line at 'http://staff.ttu.ee/~jaak.henno/mipro2024/'