Is Table Lookup a Lost Concept, like Long Division or the Rotary Phone Dial?

General Discussion
1

I am starting to suspect that the concept of table lookup has been lost to the youngest target audience of AI2.

Consider how many artifacts of table lookups are no longer used:

  • Paper phone books
  • Log tables
  • Paper based dictionaries
  • Mortgage tables in little portable booklets (I used one when I financed my house)
  • Trigonometric tables
  • Paper route schedules for mass transit (not yet, but soon)
  • The Rollodex
  • metal filing cabinets loaded with labelled folders (soon)

Maybe part of the AI2 curriculum should include providing students with tables and asking them to look up values in those tables by hand, then asking them to write code to do that?

5 Likes
2

Well, @robert_parks has added the new spreadsheet oriented curriculum for climate change that has students process tabular data. I also pushed years ago for the addition of the dictionary blocks, which can be used to look up a variety of key-value based information (from a table or less regular data sources). Obviously, search engines moved people away from some of this (just Google it) and I expect that GPT-based AI tools will make things even harder. I do think more materials to help people understand how to model the data for their app is warranted.