On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:55 PM, kirby urner <kirby.ur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > The "group theory for children" idea is in retreat, with everyone > focused on remediating a borked precalculus track which almost > everyone hates, but ETS keeps nailed, turning NCTM schools into slave > ships. > > How sad for them. This relates to two conversations, going on at other lists at the moment. One is a talk among several parents working on group theory with little kids, on the Living Math list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LivingMathForum/). I translated a sixties Russian book episode about an "imaginary number carousel" (powers of i, as a rotation group), and a mother shared her experiences with her 7yo son, for example: "We started by making out own rotating around a point triangle (a triangle of one color attached with a tack and secured with a piece of eraser to sheet of paper of contrasting color) marking its original position and naming all 3 rotations. Then, after a couple of initial questions (about the angles of rotation which M. happily computed; commutation, inverse) we filled out the first part of the multiplication table." We also looked at an online toy about rotation groups a father made for his young kids, called "The flippy triangle thing": http://www.leftoverpi.com/play/flippy/ The second conversation is at IAEP (http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005466.html and http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005484.html), about the value of "similarities over differences" as a rare, remarkable cultural accompishment: http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/nonUniversals I think "group theory for kids" is an excellent example of a higher-order similarity among many different ideas and objects (numbers, rotations, etc). Refusing to work with high-order similarities is a huge step backwards, culturally. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath our email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
