[Edu-sig] OO and story problems

[kirby urner]

2011/8/27  <mokurai at earthtreasury.org>:

> It turns out that many Young-Earth Creationists deny the existence of all
> of geology (including all methods of dating rocks using radioactive
> isotopes) and most of astronomy. We cannot, in their view, see light from
> objects more than 10,000 light-years away, which is most of this galaxy
> and all of any others, and nothing that we can see can be older than that.
> But they generally won't fight you on those issues the way they will on
> all of us being descended from (presumably Black) Africans, and they won't
> insist on the stars being part of the solid firmament over the Earth where
> the rains came through in Noah's Flood. ^_^

Cosmologies come under geography in my Geometry + Geography
heuristic.

I encourage sharing many cosmologies and use a spectrum of
literal versus symbolic (to be simplistic about it).  Karen Armstrong
wrote pretty well on this didn't she ('Battle for God' etc.)

Some creation myths, such as Bucky's in 'Tetrascroll', aren't
designed to be taken literally ("a cosmic fairy tale" is the subtitle).

I liked 'Sita Sings the Blues', an adaptation of the Ramayana.

http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2011/08/sita-sings-blues-movie-review.html

I'm hoping Gagus will like my idea of using Indonesian shadow
puppets to teach Python.  We have enough lighting for puppets
after dark.

Welcome to XO country right?  Rugged and outdoorsy.

Richard Stallman in Sri Lanka:  I have a poster about that in my blog.

http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2011/04/richard-stallman-at-psu.html

>> Of course
>> anything can be twisted, but at least it's relatively free from the
>> specters
>> that your opponents point out.
>
> What?!? You don't know about NASA faking the moon landings?
>

Lets cut people some slack though:  they are often the
target of misinformation campaigns.  Salvos go out
daily from these "news sources" as you know.
NASA's are pretty good (I subscribe to a news feed).

Some others are pretty terrible.

In general the defenses seem kinda weak around here,
even against only mediocre spin doctors.

I've got a pretty entertaining rant about that from 2005:

http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2005/12/big-foot-strikes.html

>> Just a .02 cent thought ....
>
> I have one word for any of you who want meaningful story problems: sports
>

Yes, sports is a fine entry point, I agree, especially when you
zoom in on the human body and just focus on athletics in the
sense of scripted / practiced motion, picking up dance, theater
and musical performance.

In the field I describe, we've had a triathlete join us, using our
story problem output as a chief source of nutrition.

Solving our story problems requires exertion.

Not everyone is equally able to do all the problems, but that's
not a big worry.  We talk about our various gifts and leadings
and divvy the labor.  Self organization is key, without too
much overhead.

One of my fears is that as we grow bigger and more
successful, our bureaucratic layer will grow.

> The leading world sports, including baseball, soccer, cricket, rugby,
> tennis, and golf, have well over a century each of recorded statistics of
> amateur and professional leagues. One can do all kinds of probability and
> statistics, of course; the combinatorics of tournaments; the paradoxical
> aspects of rating systems; and a wide range of physics problems. There is
> no need for synthetic interest when you have the real thing. Students who
> don't care for sports can do chess (human or AI) or whatever else of
> comparable depth interests them. Or politics, thus leading to the
> thorniest question of civics: What should we do when government does not
> act in a satisfactory manner? in parallel with the question What should we
> do when the rules or laws of a game or of a tournament are clearly
> unsatisfactory? (Officiating in World Cup Soccer has come under particular
> criticism in recent years, as has the practice of deliberately making a
> red card (expulsion) foul in the last minute of a game to prevent a goal
> by the other side.)
>

Questions of ethics matter yes.  And what are young bodies doing
with themselves to keep in shape?  We usually separate that question
from mathematics, but as I've been saying, the self quantification
movement is suggesting a lifestyle where we take bold interest
in our many personal statistics.  This naturally feeds into the baseball
fascination (for example), where statistics have been king for a long
time.

I'd not want to encourage couch potato approaches to sports.
Archery.  Now there's a good one.  Also skating of various kinds,
and skiing (including on water).

First Person Physics fits in here too.  As a certified scuba diver,
I can tell you we got quite a bit of physics and chemistry in the
lectures.  Gas laws, Boyle's Law, no Gibbs Phase Rule that
I recall but it would have fit.

> I recommend the book Money Ball for showing how questions of genuine
> interest in sports have had real financial consequences in US baseball.
> For example, fans love batting averages, but on-base percentage is a much
> better predictor of winning games.
>

I write about geocaching quite a bit... (have done some, more planned).

Facility with statistics bolsters the school's ability to marshal data
about its local environment.  Ideally, a school is a repository of local
lore and history (which the students study).  In practice, the local
is often eclipsed by some "standard" (blech).  Doesn't have to be
either / or.

I don't want to give the impression it's all about statistics though.

My thread with the math teachers goes into geometry quite a bit,
usually spatial, not just plane.  Then there's a passage on Vegetable
Group Soup, which turns out to be group theory (Galois Fields,
Cayley Tables and like that).  There's Python for this part, but
also Flash, JavaScript, lots of other stuff.

Kirby