2009/9/27 Charles Cossé <cco...@gmail.com>: > Hi, this has probably been discussed to death already, but maybe not: The > point at which fancy graphing calculators become "necessary" (ie as in one's > student career) is the point at which the calculator should be abandoned and > Python employed. Just a thought ... delete at will ! > > -Charles >
Hi Charles -- Yeah, that's not controversial as far as I'm concerned, like duh (meaning I agree with you 100%, doesn't everyone?). For the humanities trained, I have this deep level criticism about how the XYZ coordinate people ala Descartes and so on, failed to think enough about the point of view, i.e. the camera position. There's this convention of positive x-axis coordinates going off to the right, but of course if your camera is on the other side of the textbook page, so to speak, looking back, then the very same positive axis is off to your left (unless you're standing on your head, relative to the starting position). All this stuff becomes more clear when you run a ray tracing system and actually need to specify the camera position. Then you come to realize that XYZ has a handedness, that both left and right handed make sense. Current high school textbooks may make lip service reference to that fact, but students rarely appreciate handedness as their spatial geometry abilities are artificially stunted by the graphing calculator curricula which are disappointingly and narrow-mindedly flatlander (landlubbery). This isn't the kind of critique most people have in mind when they start questioning the hegemony of the graphing calculator empire. It resonates more with art historians, design scientist engineers etc., looking for ways to point out shortcomings in the current "analog math" pipeline (easy as shooting ducks in a barrel (sorry for the violent imagery, diversity panel watching over my shoulder sometimes)). Here in Oregon, we're working on digital math. We have Intel, other companies, who think every school deserves a real math lab with lots of flatscreens and foss. It's economically self-serving to think this way, but then a lot of our students are interested in being gainfully employed in as silicon foresters, so it's self-serving for them to agree with us (same economy, duh). Kirby > -- > AsymptopiaSoftware|softw...@thelimit > http://www.asymptopia.org > > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > > _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
