Re: [IAEP] Abacus suggestions
On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 12:29 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima yosh...@vpri.org wrote: For the first time I launched Abacus activity today. My impression is biased as I am Japanese and learned a version of it at school, but here is some suggestions: - The graphics lacks essential dots. You see some dots in this picture for example: http://kamedake.com/_src/sc946/DSC_1976.jpg. These are period and commas. The big white two dots means the it is 1's digit. The smaller dots on the bar are put every 3 digits; even though the Japanese writing system would work better with comma's every 4 digits, we conceeded to westerners. In any case, missing these dots was the first surprise for me. I wasn't aware of this. (We should update the Wikipedia article on the Soroban.) - As you can see, the default 1's digit (the big white dots) is in the middle, not the far right. That makes sense to tell that there are numbers smaller than 1 and for the idea of power of 10. (It is often a good technique to slide the decimal point, so I first thought the red triangle to mean this, but it is something else.) The red triangle is a mark found on many Chinese abaci. It is useful for to keeping track of place while doing multiplication and division. - It trys to show the addition on the bar, but it defeats the whole point of abacus. Instead of showing: 700 + 10 + 7 = 717 We would put just one number at each column and then the result should be self explanatory. (It would show 7 1 7 and it is the result.) This is a very good idea. - For a non-5 and 4 abacus, this is not simple, but then why kids in the 21st century need to learn Mayan arithmetic... My goal with the abacus was primarily to introduce the idea of multiple representations. - So, there are some 90 combinations of two one digit number additions. Some require 5's compliment arithmetic (adding 4 to 2 is subtracting 1 but then adding 5, etc.) or 10's (if it is the right terminlogy.) Abacus was about building the muscle memory for these 90 patterns of additions. Some of these require you to move both index finger and thumb at the same time. After acquiring this muscle memory, you can do any additions without thinking, and that is the point of abacus. But now, doing additions without thining is easier with electronic calculators. At the same time, the Abacus activity is not set up for learning about this part of idea (and XO is not multi touch, so you can't build the muscle memory). I haven't played with the abacus on the touch-screen XO yet... but it is not multitouch. Muscle memory is not something we can do much with on that hardware :P - However, it is still valuable to be aware fo the idea of understanding the idea of adding 4 is adding 5 but subtracting 1, etc. Yes. - There is a bug when I tried to make my own abacus. If there is a number already on abacus, changing the board made some beads stuck outside. I thought I fixed that bug in a recent release. What version are you using? Thanks for the feedback. Regards. -walter -- Yoshiki ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Abacus suggestions
Hi, Walter, At Sun, 9 Oct 2011 08:57:51 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: - As you can see, the default 1's digit (the big white dots) is in the middle, not the far right. That makes sense to tell that there are numbers smaller than 1 and for the idea of power of 10. (It is often a good technique to slide the decimal point, so I first thought the red triangle to mean this, but it is something else.) The red triangle is a mark found on many Chinese abaci. It is useful for to keeping track of place while doing multiplication and division. Ok. The scheme on the wiki is different from what I know. Which clears the used digits of multiplier as you go and that serves as the tracker. But I see that if you have it there, it can be used for such a purpose. - For a non-5 and 4 abacus, this is not simple, but then why kids in the 21st century need to learn Mayan arithmetic... My goal with the abacus was primarily to introduce the idea of multiple representations. Ok... It seems to me that these different traditional ones are tied to the way they say or write numbers. In other words, the abacus in that culture feels natural, but once we try to map the numberto base 10 arabic notation, it requires some extra mind work. Which may be about this multiple representations. - So, there are some 90 combinations of two one digit number additions. Some require 5's compliment arithmetic (adding 4 to 2 is subtracting 1 but then adding 5, etc.) or 10's (if it is the right terminlogy.) Abacus was about building the muscle memory for these 90 patterns of additions. Some of these require you to move both index finger and thumb at the same time. After acquiring this muscle memory, you can do any additions without thinking, and that is the point of abacus. But now, doing additions without thining is easier with electronic calculators. At the same time, the Abacus activity is not set up for learning about this part of idea (and XO is not multi touch, so you can't build the muscle memory). I haven't played with the abacus on the touch-screen XO yet... but it is not multitouch. Muscle memory is not something we can do much with on that hardware :P Hmm, too bad. The real abacus as an artifact feels good. We ride on it like a skate board, too. - There is a bug when I tried to make my own abacus. If there is a number already on abacus, changing the board made some beads stuck outside. I thought I fixed that bug in a recent release. What version are you using? It is from 508dx Dextrose 2 International. -- Yoshiki ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Abacus suggestions
On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 12:29 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima yosh...@vpri.org wrote: For the first time I launched Abacus activity today. My impression is biased as I am Japanese and learned a version of it at school, but here is some suggestions: - The graphics lacks essential dots. You see some dots in this picture for example: http://kamedake.com/_src/sc946/DSC_1976.jpg. These are period and commas. The big white two dots means the it is 1's digit. The smaller dots on the bar are put every 3 digits; even though the Japanese writing system would work better with comma's every 4 digits, we conceeded to westerners. In any case, missing these dots was the first surprise for me. Would it make sense then to let the user move the dots left and right depending upon where they want the 1s digit? Or is it always in the same place? thanks. -walter - As you can see, the default 1's digit (the big white dots) is in the middle, not the far right. That makes sense to tell that there are numbers smaller than 1 and for the idea of power of 10. (It is often a good technique to slide the decimal point, so I first thought the red triangle to mean this, but it is something else.) - It trys to show the addition on the bar, but it defeats the whole point of abacus. Instead of showing: 700 + 10 + 7 = 717 We would put just one number at each column and then the result should be self explanatory. (It would show 7 1 7 and it is the result.) - For a non-5 and 4 abacus, this is not simple, but then why kids in the 21st century need to learn Mayan arithmetic... - So, there are some 90 combinations of two one digit number additions. Some require 5's compliment arithmetic (adding 4 to 2 is subtracting 1 but then adding 5, etc.) or 10's (if it is the right terminlogy.) Abacus was about building the muscle memory for these 90 patterns of additions. Some of these require you to move both index finger and thumb at the same time. After acquiring this muscle memory, you can do any additions without thinking, and that is the point of abacus. But now, doing additions without thining is easier with electronic calculators. At the same time, the Abacus activity is not set up for learning about this part of idea (and XO is not multi touch, so you can't build the muscle memory). - However, it is still valuable to be aware fo the idea of understanding the idea of adding 4 is adding 5 but subtracting 1, etc. - There is a bug when I tried to make my own abacus. If there is a number already on abacus, changing the board made some beads stuck outside. -- Yoshiki ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Abacus suggestions
Hi, The touch scrren allows manipulate the abacus activity like an real abacus... And when you have some practice with your fingers.. you can will be more quick than a calculator! I see the Japanesse children make it with incredible speed! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj7XbnYrIk0feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwY9oazPqGgfeature=related Regards Alan Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2011 11:20:07 -0700 From: yosh...@vpri.org To: walter.ben...@gmail.com CC: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: Re: [IAEP] Abacus suggestions Hi, Walter, At Sun, 9 Oct 2011 08:57:51 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: - As you can see, the default 1's digit (the big white dots) is in the middle, not the far right. That makes sense to tell that there are numbers smaller than 1 and for the idea of power of 10. (It is often a good technique to slide the decimal point, so I first thought the red triangle to mean this, but it is something else.) The red triangle is a mark found on many Chinese abaci. It is useful for to keeping track of place while doing multiplication and division. Ok. The scheme on the wiki is different from what I know. Which clears the used digits of multiplier as you go and that serves as the tracker. But I see that if you have it there, it can be used for such a purpose. - For a non-5 and 4 abacus, this is not simple, but then why kids in the 21st century need to learn Mayan arithmetic... My goal with the abacus was primarily to introduce the idea of multiple representations. Ok... It seems to me that these different traditional ones are tied to the way they say or write numbers. In other words, the abacus in that culture feels natural, but once we try to map the numberto base 10 arabic notation, it requires some extra mind work. Which may be about this multiple representations. - So, there are some 90 combinations of two one digit number additions. Some require 5's compliment arithmetic (adding 4 to 2 is subtracting 1 but then adding 5, etc.) or 10's (if it is the right terminlogy.) Abacus was about building the muscle memory for these 90 patterns of additions. Some of these require you to move both index finger and thumb at the same time. After acquiring this muscle memory, you can do any additions without thinking, and that is the point of abacus. But now, doing additions without thining is easier with electronic calculators. At the same time, the Abacus activity is not set up for learning about this part of idea (and XO is not multi touch, so you can't build the muscle memory). I haven't played with the abacus on the touch-screen XO yet... but it is not multitouch. Muscle memory is not something we can do much with on that hardware :P Hmm, too bad. The real abacus as an artifact feels good. We ride on it like a skate board, too. - There is a bug when I tried to make my own abacus. If there is a number already on abacus, changing the board made some beads stuck outside. I thought I fixed that bug in a recent release. What version are you using? It is from 508dx Dextrose 2 International. -- Yoshiki ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Abacus suggestions
At Sun, 9 Oct 2011 15:11:24 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 12:29 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima yosh...@vpri.org wrote: For the first time I launched Abacus activity today. My impression is biased as I am Japanese and learned a version of it at school, but here is some suggestions: - The graphics lacks essential dots. You see some dots in this picture for example: http://kamedake.com/_src/sc946/DSC_1976.jpg. These are period and commas. The big white two dots means the it is 1's digit. The smaller dots on the bar are put every 3 digits; even though the Japanese writing system would work better with comma's every 4 digits, we conceeded to westerners. In any case, missing these dots was the first surprise for me. Would it make sense then to let the user move the dots left and right depending upon where they want the 1s digit? Or is it always in the same place? Unless we are to invent a new scheme, I'd keep these dots at the same place. But this could be a conservable opinion... -- Yoshiki ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar Labs Oversight Board - Candidacy
I, David Farning, would like to announce my candidacy for a position on the Sugar Labs Oversight Board. As a member on the original Sugar Labs Oversight Board, I came to feel that as much as I believed in the vision of OLPC and Sugar Labs there were a number of needs in the ecosystem which could be met by a third organization. 1. The voice and needs of deployments were being over shadowed by the global voice of Sugar Labs and OLPC. 2. There was no organization provide service and support for deployments. As a result, deployments required a significant amount of technical sophistication before they could get started. 3. Because of the volunteer nature of Sugar Labs, developers tended to work on the interesting and innovative problems rather than the daily grind necessary to deliver a fully polished educational platform. For the past two years I, and a number of other developers, have been establishing Activity Central [1] to help fill the above needs. Our model is to provide technical service and support to deployments. This effort has resulted in the Dextrose [2] operation system which we custom develop and support for several large and small deployment. Because we depend on customer revenue for our sustainability we have a strong incentive to meet the software needs of deployments. Because Dextrose is based on Upstream Sugar and OLPC OS releases Activity Central has a strong incentive to assist in the continued success of Sugar Labs and OLPC. To this end we have made a number of commitments: 1. All code written by Activity Central developers will be released with an open source license. 2. Activity Central developers spend 60% of their time on revenue generating work. They are free to spend the remaining 40% of their time on projects which are of general value to the ecosystem. 3. Activity Central supports a Community Architect whose job is identify and support local and global communities that are valuable parts of the Sugar Labs and OLPC ecosystem. From time to time I am asked why I chose to form a third organization rather than work within Sugar Labs or OLPC. A third global organization brings several advantages to the ecosystem: 1. It promotes cooperative decision making. When the ecosystem consisted of two primary participants, Sugar Labs and OLP, there was a tendency for competitive decision making. When a third player was added to the mix, the value of cooperative decision making become more apparent. 2. Organizations with a business focus often provide value to a Free Software ecosystem. Interestingly OLPC-A has seen this and has been shifting toward a 'social entrepreneurship' model. 3. Activity Central approaches the ecosystem from a different viewpoint than either sugar Labs or OLPC. As global innovators both Sugar Labs' and OLPC's strengths are top down. Ideas and Implementations flow down from the central organization to deployments and users. As a service provider, most of Activity Central's ideas and implementation flow up from deployments and user. Our work flow is to solve issues faced by individual deployments which we generalize and push upstream. thank you, David Farning 1. http://activitycentral.com/ 2. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Worker Bees Wanted For XO Manual Refresh!
Hello! Here is a great opportunity for you to get involved in an important OLPC/Sugar Labs project! A new revised version of the XO Users Manual and Help Activity is coming, and we need your help. The XO Users Manual originated with a book sprint in Austin TX in summer 2008 and has had many additions and revisions since then. Now we will be making a new revision, complete with some new chapters, updated information about hardware and software, and new images to match current software releases. There are 2 easy ways to get involved. 1) Participate in person at the OLPC-SF Summit There will be a mini book-sprint on Friday October 21 in conjunction with the OLPCSF Summit. We will be working at the Kleider home in Bolinas from 10AM to 4PM. Currently there are 6 people signed up to work on that day. We have been told that book sprints work best with 6-10 people, so we have room for up to 4 more. We especially need people who love to write, are familiar with the XOs and Sugar, and can concentrate on the task at hand even when all sorts of other fun things may be going on to distract you. If you would like to join our little working group that day, please add your name to the list at: http://bit.ly/qCf7wB 2) Participate remotely wherever you are, before and after the SF SummitWe also will be doing a lot of work, both before and after the SF Summit, remotely, online. If you are unable to attend or participate on the 21st, we will still need a lot of help completing this important revision of the XO Users Manual. We would love to have you join us! We will be using an online book writing tool and communicating online to collaborate. Everyone who plans to participate, either in person or remotely can learn more about it and should sign up by following the instructions here: http://bit.ly/qPoaDu If you have any questions about participating in this project, just ask in a reply to this email! And.if, by chance, you find yourself with the weekend of October 21 to 23 free and would like to join us in San Francisco, there is still time to sign up! You can get more info here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SanFranciscoBayArea/OLPCSF_Community_Summit_2011 And you can register here: http://olpcsf2011.eventbrite.com/?ref=ebtn Hope to see you there or online... Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] La Magallanes MG2 tiene acelerómetros.. ¿como los podemos usar?
Me Acabo de enterar de que las MAgallanes MG2 del Plan Ceibal en Uruguay tienen acelerómetros, lo probé instalado el Algadoo http://www.algodoo.com/wiki/Download, un software para simular mundos en 2D: http://www.taringa.net/posts/animaciones/5886212/Algoodo-un-programa-muy-divertido.html Leí en un mail de Bert Freudenberg que estaba modificando Etoys para trabajar con los acelerómetros de las XO 1.75. Estaría muy bueno si al Etoys también le funcionan los acelerómetros en la Magallanes MG2 http://rapceibal.ning.com/forum/topics/laptops-para-educacion-media (es una Classmate II FAbricada en Portugal) LAs Magallanes las tiene los chicos de Liceo, de 12 a 15 años de edad, y vienen con Ubuntu. Trae instalada Etoys, Mathgraph, Geogebra, Tux PAint y Sugar con TurtleArt Paolo Benini Montevideo ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
