I've been haunting the math-teach list, as usual, suggesting we take a page from AP computer science and build our math around an interlinked, themed, consistent set of story problems -- rather than making these "meaningless" (deliberately).
The opponents in this debate bring up the specter of political manipulation, propaganda, tainted "pure math" with someone's good ideas about applications. My approach to math teaching, as readers here know (some of 'em), is to bake OO into the matrix pretty early, meaning the idea of "math objects" (vectors, polyhedrons, rational numbers) connects to our Pythonic notion of types. Here's some background reading for any wanting to sample the more detailed nuances of this thread (on-going, and for over a decade for sure). http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2289577&tstart=0 (most posters long time veterans of this list, with carved out positions) I also take it a step further in that the story problems under consideration often have a strong "off your duff" component, in that your mathematical reasoning translates into physical expenditure of energy. Yes, sounds a lot like summer camp (the "self quantification movement" also syncs up). http://fastwonderblog.com/2011/07/30/crunching-the-numbers-open-source-community-metrics-at-oscon/ http://hashtags.foxepractice.com/healthcare-hashtag-analytics.php?hashtag=QuantifiedSelf http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/urnermindstorm.pdf Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
