Re: Are teachers really so unwilling to learn?

[Hilaire Fernandes <hilaire@seul.org>]

bickiia@earlham.edu writes:

 > I was thinking about it with a different spin.  Not learning math
 > through computers, or computers through math, but for *us* to learn
 > from math how to teach these ideas.  If we want to help people
 > learn about some of the abstract notions that are shared with math,
 > there's been a lot more effort in these directions by math
 > educators than computer educators.
 > 
 > >For general math teaching you may ask Hilaire who is on this
 > >list. He is quite modest about his teaching but his thinking about
 > >teaching math and geometry is way beyond most teachers.
 > 
 > I don't know if Hilaire is following this thread... if you are, how
 > would you go about teaching something like representation and
 > encoding from a mathematical perspective?  Or any of the other
 > ideas that underly computing?

It's depend on the public you have and how far you want to go with it.
But a possible introduction with bits can be a parallel with
open/close electric circuit, and this is really not a math perspective
:)

This can come later with pratical situation :

. X windows is in 16 bits mode, what does it mean ? So you can
introduce some combinator math

. I have a bit representation of a number, what does it mean in
decimal number ? So you can lead to a reflexion on how are represented
numbers and how you decompoe them in their base (2 in this case)

. You can also introduce Euclide divsion to convert from base 10 to
base 2

But in most case, only the first point may be useful to computer users.

From this exemple, you can see how I like to teach math, from a
pratical situation leading to a more abstract one.

Hope it helps.

Hilaire