PADI tables finally going away?

[Rainer]

By "in one place" Blackwood means you can see all NDL info for various times/depths in one glance (i.e. a table), not that you can't access this all on a single computer (that being his point, you can, it's just not all presented at the same time).

Sure it is, and it's on your hose or wrist! No looking for it in a bag. You can even plug in different NitrOx mixes and see how they affect your dive. Try to do that with a table and no calculator handy.

 

[Blackwood]

^^ Trust the linguist to accurately say what I meant

 

[boulderjohn]

I just finished teaching the academics and pool portions of an OW class this weekend.

As usual, we started going over the first knowledge review, which includes Boyle's Law. As usual, I taught them how this affects their tissues during a dive. I used my normal presentations on diffusion, showing how tissues on-gas and off-gas. I showed them why we need slow ascents, stops, and surface intervals to be safe.

Later on, we talked about altitude, and important concept in Colorado. I explained why they needed to treat altitude diving differently from sea level diving.

We also talked about the factors that predispose people to DCS and why that would be true.

We talked about dive planning.

All of that is the same instruction I have been doing for years, and I believe my students at that point had a pretty good understanding of all that stuff.

Then, in knowledge reviews 4 and 5, we talked about how you measure those things and do your planning.

That's when things got different, because this group of students had learned using the eRDPml, not tables. I have never taught a class with no tables before.

How was it different?

They all understood how to use it perfectly, and they made no mistakes using it, without my having to do much teaching at all. I've never had that experience before. They thought it was easy and even fun. We did a bunch of planned multi-level dives using it, and they cruised through it.

I then went back to my normal instruction and showed them how to plan and measure dives with the computers we were using in the pool sessions.

I am not sure I see a lot wrong with that.

 

[leabre]

Sure it is, and it's on your hose or wrist! No looking for it in a bag. You can even plug in different NitrOx mixes and see how they affect your dive. Try to do that with a table and no calculator handy.

Ratio Deco.

 

[boulderjohn]

Ratio Deco.

Ratio Deco does not use tables.

 

[Blackwood]

Ratio Deco does not use tables.

The MDL table (be it 120 rule, the UTD version, the NDL values from the DSAT table, or something else) is part of Ratio Deco.

 

[boulderjohn]

The MDL table (be it 120 rule, the UTD version, the NDL values from the DSAT table, or something else) is part of Ratio Deco.

That is really quite different from the tables that we are discussing in this thread.

 

[ScubaSteve]

That is really quite different from the tables that we are discussing in this thread.

Not knowing what the MDL tables are, I will ask whether having a pre-existing foundation of Tables (from OW/AOW/EANx) would help prepare a diver for such training? Would it help them pick it up quicker and retain it better?

 

[boulderjohn]

Not knowing what the MDL tables are, I will ask whether having a pre-existing foundation of Tables (from OW/AOW/EANx) would help prepare a diver for such training? Would it help them pick it up quicker and retain it better?

The tables we are talking about are actually 3 different tables set up on one piece of plastic. One tells you your pressure groups after various stops at various depths. The second table tells you how that pressure group changes after a surface interval. The third table tells you how to make find and apply a "penalty" for residual nitrogen to the next dive. Very little of that process is used in ratio deco.

 

[Blackwood]

That is really quite different from the tables that we are discussing in this thread.

Not really, it's just the final entry in every depth column.