There was an interesting article in Swedish state news from my hometown about a visiting Japanese math teacher that teaches math in an unusual way. Instead of presenting a mathematical method and then letting pupils practice with lots of examples, in Japan it is up to students and their own imagination to figure out how to solve a problem.  日本の数学の先生はみんなこんな風に教えているのだろうか？

This made me think about a paper I wrote 10 years ago about programming assignments and creativity, where I stated: 

“Course assignments play an important role in the learning process and often allow the students to comprehend the theoretical part of the course by applying it in practice. However, programming assignments in general, also those in graphics and visualisation, can be constructed in such a way that they prohibit creativity. Instead, the task is merely limited to find out what the teacher expects, rather than actually promoting the learning process or increasing the students enthusiasm and the self confidence that comes from overcoming problems that are actually understood.”

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Published by Anders

Anders Hast received a PhD in Computerised Image processing at Uppsala university in 2004. In 2011 he spent one year at IIT, CNR, Pisa in Italy as an ERCIM fellow and after that he received a full time position as associate professor and in 2019 he became professor in image processing, both at Uppsala University. He has been affiliated with UPPMAX super computer centre where he worked as an application expert in Scientific Visualisation and later in the field of digital humanities together with the Centre for digital humanities in Uppsala. His recent research has focused on image processing and computer vision, for applications in microscopy, aerial photography, object recognition and especially hand written text recognition and face recognition.

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