The pain point which I’m trying to alleviate is students’ inability to recognize a real world use case for some theoretical topic in various fields of study. By creating a forum and getting teachers or experts to explain what is so cool and awesome about knowing what the student is about to learn, I’d like to motivate interest in learning the topic at hand. How does knowing it affect the decisionmaking process? With what other challenges does it help? What would they not be able to accomplish if not for the given material?
People learn well when they are interested in a given topic. They are interested because they found a way to relate to it in some way. Sometimes the material is far removed from the actual use-case, or the significance of it is not explained very well by the text or the instructor. Creating a place specifically for this discussion would be pretty interesting, I think.
StackExchange’s Q&A format seemed perfect for validating this idea, but it doesn’t seem to be an option, unfortunately. The new topic proposal is closed: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/104796/why-study
I’d love to see what you think of the idea. Whether it makes sense, whether it will be useful, and if there are other places for hosting this (aside from making it yourself, for now).
Here are my examples of questions - possibly the reason why it was rejected. I tried to pick different fields and ask something thought provoking. - Why study zeta functions in mathematics? - Why study Utopian literature? - Why study Imperialism and Nation-State Formation? - Why study molecular forces in physics? - Why study type theory in computer science?
