Posted in Education, Math & Science on February 27, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Bill Kerr, a teacher/blogger I read regularly, wrote a post recently that I enjoyed immensely, called “What is maths?” He doesn’t answer the question, but what I like is he cites some other articles that talk about what math is not. They make it clear that a) we’re probably not being taught math completely in schools–even though we think we are, and [...]
Posted in Analysis, Education, Math & Science on August 20, 2007 | 2 Comments »
On July 7 The Aspen Institute held a public panel with some corporate leaders and policymakers on American competitiveness. It was aired on C-SPAN on 7/21. From what I understand this video is only up temporarily, so at some point this link will become dead. You can watch the video of the panel by selecting ”American Perspectives: [...]
Posted in Analysis, Math & Science, Programming, Squeak, Technology and Software on July 11, 2007 | 16 Comments »
“Pascal is for building pyramids–imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms–imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place.”
– Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs,
by Harold Abelson and Gerald Sussman
In this post I’m going to talk mostly about this speech below, [...]
Posted in Analysis, Math & Science, Programming on July 10, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Is everything a form of computation? That’s what some scientists are saying. I found the CACM article “Computing is a Natural Science”, by Peter Denning on reddit recently. I looked at the title and thought, “Yeah, so?” When I took computer science at Colorado State University 14 years ago it was in the College of Natural Sciences. At some [...]
Posted in Analysis, Education, Math & Science, Programming, Technology and Software on July 3, 2007 | 5 Comments »
A few years ago Alan Kay was on a tour of sorts giving a speech entitled, “The Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet”. I believe he began it when he won his Turing Award in 2003. For so many years Alan Kay has been saying “The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet”. He sees the computer as [...]
Posted in Education, Math & Science on February 11, 2007 | 12 Comments »
M. J. McDermott talks about math education in Washington state.
She talks about and demonstrates some “reformed” methods for solving arithmetic problems that have been commonly taught in the 4th and 5th grades: Cluster problems (taught in the “Terc” books), and partial products and partial quotients, and the “lattice method” of multiplication (taught in books called “Everyday Math”). She [...]
