Sunday, Sunday - last week tech support, this week, school calculators...
"We're just off to town to get a school calculator... do you want anything?""What..? I thought you'd already got a calaculator? No - I KNOW you've got one..."
"I've lost it..."
"Did you try looking for it?"
"Yes - for two hours" - read: 10 minutes, if that...
"And I NEED one - I couldn't do my homework last week..."
Looks around the living room, where there are currently three laptops, one desktop PC and a Wii with browser enabled; and a mobile phone...
"But there are calculators all over the place - HUGE ones..."
"But I need it for SCHOOL!"
"You just said it was for homework... What was the homework, anyway? Pick any one of these computers and I'll show you how you could have done your homework on it...in several different ways, probably..."
And so it goes...
But when as the last time you used a calculator? When I need to "do sums" I use Google as a calculator, the Windows calculator, a spreadsheet, or a bit of Javascript... I guess my phone may hava simple calculator too?
When calculators first arrived, they were a boon (?) to maths education. When the first affordable computeres arrived, school Maths departments started teaching elementary programming (this will date me: who remembers the BBC Model B computer in school?)
From what I can tell, now we have large scale computer suites in most schools, no one teaches programming... and the majority of kids who are forced into using calculators in school in their compulsory maths lessons would have no idea about how to use a computer to do the same thing... even using the Windows calculator or Google...
On a similar tack, the other day I came across the Mac Grapher application, which lets you enter equations and plot the corresponding graphs in 2D or 3D; some of them are really beautiful... I don't know whether schools have "produce the most <whatever> graph" using similar tools, where <whatever> could be 'beautiful', 'complicated', 'curvy' or 'wibbly', but I could see this sort of approach turning graph/equation exploration into a game...
...I can even imagine a social "graph-plotting" site where you get to submit your own graphed equations, tag them, and rate each others...
Is that a "how sad is that..." sort of thing to say, or is it a way of thinking how we can leverage mild competition (read: social networks...) and aesthetic/visual sensibilities in exploring how equations works and how their components affect their visual representation?
Tags: maths, calculator, visualisation, grapher, equations
Posted by ajh59 at November 4, 2007 02:00 PMI did my first programming on a BBC B (and remember the thrill when the BBC Master with a whole 64k came out). I find it very disappointing that programming seems to have dropped off the syllabus in UK schools. Although I've never been a serious programmer, I feel that this early foray into how computers work has stood me in great stead to understand what they are capable of, and to apply that knowledge to use computers to improve how I (and those around me) work.
Posted by: Owen Stephens at November 4, 2007 04:35 PMEee, and another thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FatHLHG2uGY
Three things.
1. Marc Prensky stated at a recent conference that the main thing we should be teaching in our schools, the fundamental literacy of the 21st century, is programming. Not because you will spend your working life programming as such but rather it requires a particular way of thinking about the world that is as important (if not more so) that the skills taught since time immoral.
2. Some people would probably say that even the correct display of a mathematic equation is a thing of beauty. Talk to Jonathan Fine if you need convincing!
3. Calculators. Pah! http://www.taswegian.com/SRTP/JavaSlide/javaslide.html