It is a lovely morning here in New Zealand, and the sun is rising over the bay that my house overlooks. So naturally I am wandering around the web.<\/p>\n
Gary Carson’s Math and Poker blog<\/a> is one that I regularly follow (not the least because he points to this blog). He writes about the role OR plays in understanding poker<\/a> and about how OR is taught:<\/p>\n Part of the problem that operations research has in getting recognition is the way we teach it \u2014 it\u2019s taught as a bunch of algorithms for the most part. Even when it\u2019s taught as a bunch of models to be applied to real problems, the models are taught as members of a tool kit. Seldom do we teach OR as a process of using models to abstract or isolate the elements of a problem that are critical to decision making related to that problem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I think OR education needs to put more of a focus on using the model and less focus on solving the model. I think students would form a deeper grasp of what OR is all about if that was done. Stuff like analysis of residuals and sensitivitey of LP solutions are just too important to be glossed over.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I teach at a business school and we have moved much more to teaching about using models for real-world business decisions. Things like sensitivity do end up taking a backseat, however, since without understanding the underlying algorithm\/mathematics things like dual values are just mysterious black boxes. The challenge is, I think, how to get enough of the fundamentals across so people can confidently and correctly use the resulting models. And I think we are all over the map on this at the moment, to the detriment of the field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is a lovely morning here in New Zealand, and the sun is rising over the bay that my house overlooks. So naturally I am wandering around the web. Gary Carson’s Math and Poker blog is one that I regularly follow (not the least because he points to this blog). He writes about the role … Continue reading “OR, Poker, and Teaching”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-web","category-education"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}