Actually, I was not talking about prodigies of any age. The idea was not about "hitting a pre-teen with ... J", rather it's about using J as a workbench with which educators can rapidly mentor your average student to experiment and grow with J and with the J IDE. In the following example, I recall a book called "Confessions of a Sneaky Organic Cook (Or, How to Make Your Family Healthy When They're Not Looking!)".
Perhaps, with appropriate prepartion, an educator might mentor a number of students with a technique that might be called "Confessions of a Sneaky Educator (or How to get average students to learn above average computer and mathematics skills)". very simplistic example in J: ADD =. +/ NB. here "ADD" means to add some numbers ADD 2 2 4 ADD 1 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 76 SUM =. ADD NB. here "SUM" is another word for "ADD" SUM 2 2 4 NB. we now have THREE similar ways to add some numbers: +/ 2 2 4 ADD 2 2 4 SUM 2 2 4 If we only focus on prodigies, we short change society. There are many potential students who are highly capable even though they are not prodigies. Further, providing and mentoring a variety of tools via OLPC XO-1 may even help the educators to discover the next Srinivasa Ramanujan before she/he is washed out to sea by a tsunami or blown to bits by a roadside IED. Regards, Gerry P.S.: Best wishes to all and especially to the underprivileged in 2009 and beyond. _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
