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Ruby

Enrica Fedeli-Jaques
Enrica Fedeli-Jaques
6,773 Points

what's the point in showing first the incorrect way of doing something?

Hi, not a question, just a feedback. What's the point of showing first the incorrect way of doing it? Asking because my code (which wasn't working) wasn't working only because after return I had mistakenly added area and perimeter before the math operations. watching the video I started correcting all my code following Jay step by step only to get to the end and realizing that "wait a sec, that's what I had done!" crtl+z all the way back to get back to my original code to check again where I had made mistakes. I don't see why would you show an incorrect way first

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,271 Points

I've seen this in several courses, so I'm pretty sure it's intentional. This is more commonly done in training for life-critical applications such as Emergency Medical Technician or Airline Pilot, where the goal is help students to be able to accept and correct mistakes instead of concealing and/or justifying them.

But some of the ways I can see it might be useful in engineering training:

  • to encourage experimentation and creativity
  • to show how mistakes can contribute to deeper understanding
  • to improve motivation and self-esteem
  • and to create opportunities to demonstrate problem analysis and debugging