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Re:Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide Sc... by analog31 on Saturday August 26, 2017 @04:30PM (#15107275)
Today, at /best/, the most effective use of computers is as office software and assignment submission tools. In that use model a student might be better served by a cheaper or more powerful fixed station in their room and a portable 'notepad' (or large cell phone) for field use.

Agreed, with the proviso that "office software" includes some sort of computational environment. It bugs me that "school math" is so radically different than how adults -- possibly including mathematicians -- do math in their work and lives. Don't get me wrong, I breezed through school math, but I rarely use it now.

I open up a Jupyter notebook. It's not doing math for me. It's doing computations that are guided by my math knowledge, which is often coupled with empirical data.

Many people use Excel, including those who claim to be bad at (school) math, yet they are capable of doing useful computational work, even if it is relatively simplistic.

I'd like to see students learn math in more of an exploratory fashion, aided by real world software. For instance I think that probability and statistics would be a lot more intuitive if it were approached through modeling via random numbers. Problems that are hard to grasp via equations might be easy to grasp by modeling to predict an outcome.

Re:Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide Sc... by abecedarius on Saturday August 26, 2017 @08:20PM (#15108249)
Example of the latter: http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Probabili...

I don't know if any youngsters have learned probability from there first. Would be interesting to hear.