Nod. A random TIL from Friday, courtesy to qwen.ai: In contrast to USA educational estimation, which emphasizes point estimates, China reportedly emphasizes directional estimation to establish an envelope, upper and lower (strict) bounds - Da Gu and Xiao Gu.

I've long though we'd be better off doing incremental bounding, hard and soft, in part because the group discourse dynamics are so much better. "Ok, who can suggest another bound, upper or lower, hard or soft?" vs "Your step 2 is too big. Well, your step 4 is too small!".

Which raises a question - might this diversity be leveraged? Science education content improvement is often bottlenecked on regional conditions. As when a high-stakes exam doesn't cover topic X, so there's regionally less interest/opportunity to explore better teaching of X, or using X to better teach other things. This especially bites when you wish to explore mashups, X+Y+Z with each taught well, but they're every one both in poor shape and bottlenecked.

Both countries largely fail to create a physical intuition, a feel for reasonable values - in the US because it's a secondary priority, and in China reportedly because estimation has become nationally high stakes, so memorization gets emphasized over feel.

Can we leverage that regional difference? For a strawman, might one develop content with improved bounding facilitating a rough quantitative feel for reasonable values, in China where it's sort of aligned with the flow, even if off to the side, rather than in the US, where the aligned energy is much less. And then, having developed that content in China, bring it back to the US, where again off to the side, there's perhaps the flexibility and inquiry perspective for the material to appeal in its developed form? And WeChat Groups seem potentially a way to get heterogenous ad hoc communities around content development, for which I don't know a US equivalent.

For analogy, I'm told the US advanced placement exam for French, is both hard, and narrowly focused on a style of conversational French. So people teach to the test, and all else that is "French", is deemphasized. But let's say you have a VR app which develops both that conversational, but also cultural and business and travel. You might develop it the US, leveraging the conversational incentive. And release elsewhere, where there's interest and room for the other bits, even if there wasn't sufficient incentive elsewhere to build the app in the first place. Maybe?