[Edu-sig] Teaching Middle-School Math with Python

[Steve Litt]

Hi Fred,

Simple but interesting ---

In 7th grade the school genius told me what an algorithm is, and how to use
a slide rule to find it. The next few months I took my slide rule (now you
know how ancient I am) and "fooled around" with it. I invented an
arithmetic process I called "infra-addition", which if I remember was A
infraadd B = log(A+B), and delighted in graphing it etc. (simple minds,
simple pleasures). Around that time my Dad taught me to make a
multiplication chart, and my 8th grade teacher taught us about base 8 and
base 16 arithmetic, after which I made multiplication charts for everything
from 2 to 16.

I guess what I'm getting at is if a child is made curious enough, a
calculator will suffice in providing him with days of simple but
interesting math.

Steve



At 10:46 AM 10/6/00 -0400, Fred Bartlett wrote:
>Has anyone had any success in changing public-school math curricula at
>the middle-school level?
>
>I've been busily learning Python while my daughter has been busily
>learning 6th-grade math. The contrast between the two experiences is
>considerable: I can learn Python in a clear, clean, organized way; my
>daughter can't learn math that way -- well, she _could_, but her
>textbook militates against it.
>
>Her textbook takes a "problem-solving" approach and teaches "high-level"
>thinking. By this they mean, I think, large numbers of word problems.
>That would be fine, of course, if they did it right. But they seem to be
>teaching heuristics rather than algorithms -- that is, each kind of
>problem is treated as if it were sui generis.
>
>I was especially saddened -- and motivated -- when she asked me, "How
>could anyone ever be interested in this stuff?"
>
>I began to muse that an introduction to programming could both help kids
>see the connections among types of problems and provide a salutary dose
>of rigor to the curriculum. (Donald Knuth said somewhere that one can't
>really be sure that one understands something until one can teach a
>computer to do it.)
>
>The only other languages I found in my web searches used below the
>college level were Java, C/C++, (Visual)Basic, and Scheme -- none of
>which would be appropriate at the level I'm contemplating. But Python,
>for all its virtues, is a relatively obscure language. It's a good bet
>that no one at the Board of Ed has heard of it!
>
>Meanwhile, I found out about our "technology" curriculum from middle
>through high school: It's all Microsoft, so we're paying tens or
>hundreds of thousands of dollars for license fees. (I'm sure no one here
>will defend that practice!) I would like to change that, too.
>
>Kirby Urner has done some interesting things with algebra and beyond;
>but I didn't find any pre-algebra math at his site.
>
>Hans Magnus Enzensberger's _The Number Devil_ contains the kind of math
>I'm looking for: simple -- but interesting! -- applications of basic
>arithmetic on the integers (and, soon enough, the reals).
>
>So -- any hints for me out there?
>
>Thanks!
>Fred
>
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