The exploratory type of math that the high school is trying to teach unfortunately can be extremely time consuming and off-putting. The result is that I keep hearing "I hate math". On more than one occasion when one of my kids asked for help with math it occurred to me that we could gain insight into the problem using a computer. On those occasions I typically turned to a spreadsheet for the power it can give in quickly generating numerical results from simple expressions that could take a long time to produce with pencil an paper. This can make discerning patterns far less laborious. The question that has been nagging me is why are the schools not taking advantage of computers to teach math? Recently I have started to play around with Python. In part because I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi. So I came across Matplotlib and IPython. One of the instructors at my University decided to use Python in his 2nd year physics course where they are using differential equations. I have started looking for material related to python being used to teach high school math. So, I started googling Python Math K-12 to see what would come up. It looks like a number of schools have combined Math and programming in python.
http://pyvideo.org/video/437/pycon-2011--panel--python-in-schools--teaching-it http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~tneller/resources/k12/index.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbeHdg8mtdc http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/python/33832 As a parent it is kind of tricky to have the right material on hand at the right time for when any particular question comes up. Yesterday I thought I'd see what can be done with fractions. I discovered that there is a module for fractions but also that one can construct simple functions for gcd and lcm and not use the fractions module. I'm thinking this approach might be better for reviewing fractions. If I do end up using python to help my 15 year old with her homework I think that I had better be proficient at it or the demonstration will go flat. I have python on our computer now so she could actually explore it herself at any time. Searching up material on the web has turned a lot up but to talk to my daughter about it and educators as well it would be really helpful to have a good book on hand. I have noticed there are some quite divergent opinions on how to proceed. As a parent I need to be able to support whatever they are currently doing so material that goes off on different tangents won't be helpful. _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
