Many students go through a great deal of material in a standard academic program but still do not understand what is technical class about. There are many reasons for this. For one thing, the coursework may be confusing because it was put together by people who did not have the background or expertise to write it well. Or, the coursework may be hard because the student’s prior educational experiences were less relevant.
But what is a technical class is actually very simple. It is the “what.” The text that you read and study will tell you what the topics will be, and how they will be presented. The texts are written as if the people who wrote them were having a conversation with you, about a particular topic. If you are having this conversation, then you are reading and studying what is technical!
Some of the topics covered in what is technical class types of diagrams, charts, graphs, and so forth. These can be confusing if students do not already know how to make them. If you ask a student to draw a diagram and explain what is technical about the diagram, you can often make a connection to what is happening in the world of math. Or, if the student has worked out a method for computing a number using the computer, then you can explain the way in which the method is used.
What is a technical class, then, is just the underlying topic of what is being taught. It is not the body of work that happens over the course of the semester. What is technical here, is the nuts and bolts of what you learn in the classroom. The coursework may cover lots of material that students already know, but it is the underlying part of the class that makes it what it is.
What is technical class is typically taught in courses that begin in the fall of their junior year, or in the spring of their senior year. The first course, you will probably take in what is technical is something called Data Structures. This coursework involves learning how to represent data using mathematical tools, and then how to organize the data using these tools. It also covers algorithm studies, and ways to choose the best mathematical model for a particular problem.
After Data Structures, students move onto Learning Algorithms, which are a more involved course, but still one that cover many of the same topics. Again, what is technical here is the nuts and bolts of creating the correct algorithm, and learning the best ways of testing for it. There is a lot of math involved in this coursework, as well as thinking through various algorithms. One interesting thing about this coursework is that the student has to prove before they can use an algorithm.
The last course in what is technical is Discrete Mathematics, which is a great class for those students who already know some of the material in the other classes, such as Arithmetic or Discrete Math. The core ideas in this class are still mathematics itself, but it adds in concepts from Discrete Math, such as probability. Students learn how to think mathematically about probability and how to solve problems using probability. In what is a technical class, they learn what is used to represent the data they have, and what they will need to do to put the data into the desired form. Once a student has learned the core ideas of what is technical in high school, they then can branch out and look at other areas of study.
