Economist's View: "The Mathematics Generation Gap"

Re:Economist's View: "The Mathematics Generation Gap" by noblethrasher on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @09:41AM (#2602520)

Tangentially, up until grade 6 or 7 (in the late 80's), my math books also included BASIC code related to the concepts --- usually at the end of the chapter. It's how I became curious about programming and more so about math (though in my case none of the teachers ever did anything with the material, I either just typed the code into my family's TI-99A or tried to mentally work out what the program was doing).

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Re:Economist's View: "The Mathematics Generation Gap" by sedachv on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @12:55PM (#2603355)

This was largely a result of Seymour Papert and his work on constructionism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionist_learning

The trend has been away from this as programming has gotten more difficult and the general decline in resources for developing and updating school curricula.

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Re:Economist's View: "The Mathematics Generation Gap" by fferen on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @11:26AM (#2602937)

That's amazing, I wish any of my math books had that; we would probably see a lot more young programmers these days. I can seriously say that the only reason I even got into programming was discovering TI-Basic in 7th grade (although the habits it taught me had to be slowly unlearned as I started using a real language ;)

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Re:Economist's View: "The Mathematics Generation Gap" by T-hawk on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @12:36PM (#2603261)

Well, the entry barriers to programming were actually lower in the 1980s. Pretty much every home computer came with a flavor of BASIC built right in to ROM or at the worst bundled with it on a disk. Anybody with a TI-99/4A, C64, various Apples, Atari 400/800/ST, or many others could jump right in to that kind of programming.

What's the equivalent nowadays? Windows doesn't really come with any programming environment. There's no standard for those math books to write towards. Yeah, there's plenty of free compilers for any language, but the funnel from even knowing they exist, to having a reason to get one, then finding it, and downloading and installing, gets pretty lengthy and technical for your average seventh-grader or whatever.

Heck, I would argue that TI calculator BASIC is the closest thing we have to a universally available development environment for secondary students today.

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Re:Economist's View: "The Mathematics Generation Gap" by knshaum on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @06:12PM (#2604883)

Every desktop of laptop OS I know of comes with at least one JavaScript interpreter installed.

The real problem is the growth of phones and tablets as preferred client devices; while the JS interpreter is still there, it becomes a challenge to enter and run the code.

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Re:Economist's View: "The Mathematics Generation Gap" by ultrasaurus on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @01:27PM (#2603515)

To some extent the problem is our options are too rich, we've gone from flavours of basic to everything being available since all machines have a browser. One kid might use Scratch, another JavaScript, another GameMaker.

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