[Edu-sig] BBC NEWS UK Education GCSE 'gender gap' sparksconcern

[Patrick K. O'Brien]

[Jason Cunliffe]
>
> I've been semi-watching the Annenburg/CPB on late night Channel
> 25 for the past
> 10 days. The mechanical universe, Mitch Resnick on computational
> literacy with
> 'crickets' and Lego Mindstorms. One series focused on early
> numeracy and problem
> solving. It had the teacher first put problems to the kids. Then
> the reverse.
> Wow they really woke up. You could see their brains going into a
> different gear.
> It made me think that that's a large part of what programming and
> especially
> with a CLI-based system like Python is sort of like. when the kids were
> 'designing' prblems for teh teacher, she became the computer
> system and they in
> their clusters became little alogothimic scripts. Fascinating

Can you expand on that a bit? Do you mean the kids came up with math
problems that the teacher then had to solve? Or some other kind of problem?
I'm trying to understand exactly how they became little algorithmic scripts
because it does sound fascinating to me as well. Thanks.

--
Patrick K. O'Brien
Orbtech
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