[Edu-sig] the Barbie Blowup

kirby urner kirby.urner at gmail.com
Fri Nov 21 16:49:36 CET 2014


Geekdom is having a field day over this apparent
stumble by Mattel as it contrives to boost Barbie
in the brains department without being too disruptive
to cultural norms (she's a mainstream doll after all,
meant for middle-of-the-road middle-classers, e.g.
nuclear families with power nesters in the suburbs [1]).

She was well on her way to geek status until this new
"Barbie book"...

...thread continues on the Math Forum @ Drexel:

http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=9647539

Kirby

[1] 'Over the Hedge'
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327084/
(Barbie grows up to become president of homeowners
association)

Random comment on student quiz (me to student on a question about set type):

playing with the set type for awhile, poking and prodding, is great review
of the whole concept of set,
a mathematical concept often used to introduce mathematical concepts in
their most generic and
therefore definitive form.  As a former high school calculus teacher, I
always wonder why more
schools don't take advantage of the Python prompt over the calculator, as
calculators are poor at
set operations.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20141121/c13bdada/attachment.html>


More information about the Edu-sig mailing list