I'm wondering what others on this list think of this non-standard use of "teaching" when talking about programming a computer.
The authors say we're "teaching" the computer.... """ Every teacher knows that one of the best ways to understand something is to teach it to someone else. But teaching a computer is not exactly the same as teaching other people. People have a way of interpreting what is being said to them. They read the gestures and the facial expressions of their teachers as well as the words that are spoken. The intonation of the voice is important and matters judged to be obvious are not always articulated. All this may generally assist the learning process but what matters here is that computers are essentially stupid so they cannot interpret any of the commands they are given and the teacher has to articulate everything that is to be learned. A computer has no knowledge of what its programmer is attempting to do. It only knows what it has been told and so the children who are teaching it are compelled to use precise, unambiguous and formal language. The children respect this requirement because they understand that it is not an arbitrary imposition (as many of those made by teachers often are). In todayĆs world we cannot yet address machines informally by the spoken word and, mathematically at least, there may be fewer benefits when we can. There are other characteristics of computers that make them valuable objects to teach. One of these is their interactivity. Without any computers we might use paper and pencil which are useful devices for recording results but less valuable for experimental purposes because they do not encourage an exploratory approach or suggest activity. The computer, in contrast, begs to be used. It always feels quite appropriate to key in ideas and try them out. In fact children are usually so willing to explore different possibilities that teachers are more likely to have the reverse problem of having to persuade them to stand back and reflect occasionally. """ Teaching the computer >From Micromath 18/1 2002 by Ronnie Goldstein http://www.atm.org.uk/mt/micromath.html I'd think this might backfire, as students begin thinking they're being treated much as the computers are being treated, as dull and stupid, such that teachers have to speak very... slowly... and formally. I'm poking around this site thanks to Ian at the scene, who sees ATM dooming itself in some bid to join with a dying NAMA (he was at the NAMA conference right before Pycon). http://www.nama.org.uk/ Not saying I follow entirely as I'm not in the UK (Steve Holden was supposed to translate for me), but I surmise ATM and NCTM are somewhat parallel organizations. ATM was actually founded by Caleb Gattengno, so it's ironic, what Ian is saying. http://www.atm.org.uk/people/caleb-gattegno.html The article above is obviously dated (2002), plus in mine has a lot of incorrect characters, thanks to PDF encoding problems. I think computers are running our scripts more like player pianos. We don't teach our pianos, we tune them (guitars: we play them). We *play* our computers (like guitars) more than we "teach" them, no? Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig