I wonder if it's really about the multiplication, or just about the reshuffling. Would he be okay rewriting 82+x-51 as 82-51+x?
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 11:51 AM, Charles Cossé <cco...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello All, > > Just thought I'd relay a rather interesting story: Last night I was > having my son work-out a simple problem from a new little webapp that > I coded up called "MakeItTrue" ( > http://www.asymptopia.org/MakeItTrue.html ) which had 3 arbitrary > variables embedded into a larger equation, and the objective is to > simply choose 3 values which make a true equality of the thing.... > > So, the equation we were dealing with was something like: > 82+b*c-51=d-13, and the thing that surprised me was that he didn't > think it was legal to take 82-51 before having dealt with the b*c term > ... on account of the "MyDearAuntSally..." or "BODMAS" ... or whatever > acronyms they teach in school ... he had no idea that he could do > that, merely because it had been driven-home in his head that > multiplication must always be done first ... > > Well, I thought that was rather significant, so thought I'd pass it > along to you all. > > Take care out there, > > -Charles > > -- > AsymptopiaSoftware|softw...@thelimit > http://www.asymptopia.org > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
