How do you explain...?

[NiteFox]

If anything, I've fallen into the trap of thinking lower numbers = faster attacks; mainly because I've been indoctrinated by how WoW displays weapon speed (Where a 2.90 speed gun is faster than a 3.00 speed crossbow).

Nice consistency there, Blizz.

[Nystul]

If anything, I've fallen into the trap of thinking lower numbers = faster attacks; mainly because I've been indoctrinated by how WoW displays weapon speed (Where a 2.90 speed gun is faster than a 3.00 speed crossbow).

Nice consistency there, Blizz.

What is more important is to be consistent within the game. I think that if you are going to have modifier like "Increases attack speed x%" then listing the weapon speed in seconds per attack is a bad idea. Because then people have items with +% modifier which actually lower the base stat as they see it on the screen. And the percentages are not equivalent.

[BellaStrega]

I can't fathom keeping a girlfriend around who's that dumb, no matter how she looks.

May not have anything at all to do with intelligence. It could be something like dyscalcula, too much stereotype threat during her education or even just a terrible education.

[Nystul]

May not have anything at all to do with intelligence. It could be something like dyscalcula, too much stereotype threat during her education or even just a terrible education.

It's not a fair shake anyway. It is a unit conversion issue, like the attacks per second. We spent the entire 9th grade science class working on problem solving by unit conversion, which suggests that it is anything but common sense for a lot of people. 80 x 1 is absurdly easy. Failing to recognize the problem that needs solving is a common trap. People make stupid mistakes all of the time but in the old days there were only a few witnesses. Now the whole world gets to see how dumb everyone is on twitter, youtube, etc.

[MongoJerry]

It's amazing how difficult these kinds of unit conversion problems can be for many people. I taught an Introduction to Astronomy laboratory course where as a project we built a scale model of the solar system to fit inside the large grass quad in the middle of the campus. One of the first concepts I had to go over was metric unit conversions, and I always started off by using money as a starting point. It was amazing to me how many people could convert dollars into cents and back in seconds and yet couldn't convert meters into centimeters or back, even though it was the exact same problem. There's such a disconnect at the stage where you take a problem that you can solve and then abstract it to a general case.

There's also the ability to estimate or check for "reasonableness" that eluded so many of my students. For example, in the same project where we were trying to scale the solar system down to fit inside the campus's quad, a student might after some multiplications find that a model planet should be 10,000 km away from our model Sun and think they were done with the problem. This would be after we had already talked about a km being about 6/10ths of a mile and about the length of the entire campus.

[BellaStrega]

Unit conversion's been really easy for me for a long time. I got into roleplaying games in middle school, and I ended up writing a lot of Champions characters without the aid of a calculator. At some point I started doing arithmetic mentally, which included unit conversions.

I remember in 7th grade, during a science class, the teacher said that 212 F and 100 C were the same, as was 32 F and 0 C, and during that explanation I wrote out (F-32) * 5/9 = C and (C * 9/5) +32 = F before she was finished talking. I also learned to do metric conversions from non-metric distance and mass measurements fairly quickly. The idea of unit conversions seems intuitive and simple to me, but I've been confronted with a lot of people who find them anything but, so I learned to not project assumptions about what people should be able to do based on what I can do (and vice versa, as I'm terrible at some things most people are supposed to be good at).

This has also been a problem for me as the way I do a lot of math is sort of intuitive, and I skim a lot of explicit steps to produce an accurate answer. When I had to tutor my niece in arithmetic I had to relearn how to do long division, multiplication, etc. just so I could explain it to her. On the other hand, being able to calculate tips in a few seconds impresses some people well beyond my expectations.

Also, aside from geometry, I really suck at anything more advanced.

[MongoJerry]

Unit conversion's been really easy for me for a long time. I got into roleplaying games in middle school, and I ended up writing a lot of Champions characters without the aid of a calculator. At some point I started doing arithmetic mentally, which included unit conversions.

I'm convinced that the reason why fractions were so intuitive to me compared to most of my classmates when the subject came up in math classes was the fact that I had a much bigger musical background from playing the piano, singing in choirs since I was 6, and later band. Whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, triplets, 4/4 time, 3/4 time, 2/4 time, cut (1/2) time, 6/8 time, 6/4 time, 2/3 time... music uses fractions all over the place. Plus, you get not just an intellectual feel but also a visceral feel of the fractions from the music.

[Kevin]

I'm convinced that the reason why fractions were so intuitive to me compared to most of my classmates when the subject came up in math classes was the fact that I had a much bigger musical background from playing the piano, singing in choirs since I was 6, and later band. Whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, triplets, 4/4 time, 3/4 time, 2/4 time, cut (1/2) time, 6/8 time, 6/4 time, 2/3 time... music uses fractions all over the place. Plus, you get not just an intellectual feel but also a visceral feel of the fractions from the music.

Yep.

Some of the studies that have tried to show why music helps kids learn better has tested stuff like this as well. The correlation between musical and traditional education is fairly strong and well known, the causation not as much but this is one of those factors.

If the kids have any sort of a good teacher, kids that play baseball tend to be pretty good at fractions as well as unit conversion because of batting averages and ERA. For most people grounding a concept to something they are familiar with in a different setting is very effective for teaching.

[BellaStrega]

I'm convinced that the reason why fractions were so intuitive to me compared to most of my classmates when the subject came up in math classes was the fact that I had a much bigger musical background from playing the piano, singing in choirs since I was 6, and later band. Whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, triplets, 4/4 time, 3/4 time, 2/4 time, cut (1/2) time, 6/8 time, 6/4 time, 2/3 time... music uses fractions all over the place. Plus, you get not just an intellectual feel but also a visceral feel of the fractions from the music.

That's interesting. I practiced with an instrument (cornet) in the 5th grade, and had mandatory music classes in middle school. I don't recall well enough to say whether it influenced learning fractions, but I did develop a fairly strong grasp of fractions, as well as converting them across to percentages and decimals.

That's interesting.