On my daily walks I pass a construction site where they are currently driving down piles and making concrete foundations. Piles don’t necessarily have to make contact with bedrock by the way, the friction between them and soil can be sufficient. They use cranes made of steel. I have no clue how one would calculate whether a building would sink into the soil or if some steel would snap when used in a crane. I have acquaintances who do precisely that but I only have some basic knowledge on how one would calculate forces, not how different materials respond.
I think we should implement this kind of stuff into education in the form of simplified models so that people can learn in a sort of hands-on way how this stuff works. And not just buildings and cranes obviously, this should be done with electrical stuff, maybe even chemistry. I don’t put this forward because I think computers are pretty great(I do think computers are pretty great but that’s not the reason for me putting forward this idea) but because we need more understanding of underlying physics and mathematics. I learnt a lot from trying to make controls for things in GMod/Wiremod. I studied control theory much later and came to understand why my Wiremod stuff didn’t work as I had though. So my control system for Kerbal Space Program worked much better.
Computers today are powerful enough to run these sorts of simulations quite easily. Note that I am suggesting we do this in game form, i.e. we don’t try to do full simulation using FEA(Finite Element Analysis) because that is unnecessarily expensive and might infringe on the work done by professional in this space. I think we’d be OK with 80% or 90% accuracy, even if that wouldn’t cut it for real world use. I could also be interesting for people to be told what makes their software different from the real deal.
I consider my own education to be woefully inept and think it would have been a lot better by demonstrating things in some “real” context. I can praddle on about trigonometry all day but you won’t see any use in it until I start showing electrical circuits where current is expressed as K*cos(wj). The meaning of p=m*v and E=m*v²/2 are also not in any way intuitive so leẗ́’s show people how this stuff works. Let them tinker with it. They don’t have to have physical circuits or actual weights governed by the forces of mechanics, a computer simulation would do just as well and be cheaper and more efficient.
Will I make these demonstrations or games? No, I can get fantastic things set up in Minecraft/Tekkit, Factorio and Wiremod but I don’t think I have the skills to make the implementations. As noted at the beginning, I hardly know how any of this works. I can set up computer-related examples and I’m doing that but I doubt it will be in a school near your any time soon. Partly because I deal in sort of ephemeral stuff that only lasts a few years(whereas schools mostly teach fundamentals that stay the same for much longer) and also because education seems not entirely flexible. But I think the West needs to acknowledge that this view of education isn’t working out all that well.