11–20 of 42 posts
In my experience this may be empirically false. My 4 year old could barely count, but after spending 2 months in the summer playing a couple of iPad games, he's adding 2 digit numbers and subtracting 1 digit numbers, and doing simple math puzzles. His elder brother couldnt do those till Kindergarten, and I dont think the difference was aptitude.
“The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.” In my experience this may be empirically false. My 4 year old could barely count, but after spending 2 months in the summer playing a couple of iPad games, he's adding 2 digit numbers and subtracting 1 digit numbers, and doing simple math puzzles. His elder brother couldnt do those till Kindergarten, and I dont thi…
The developers of Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) have an after school program called Program by Design (http://programbydesign.org/) and one of the things they found was that some of the students started wanting to learn more math because they needed to know how to add things to their programs! The extreme view presented in this article seems to be based more upon fear of technology than any kind of understanding of it.
My sister-in-law has taught at a Waldorf school for years. The school the article describes sounds typical. Waldorf is actually based on an extremely deviant philosophy. They get away with it because they deliver results. In particular, their kids routinely decimate all standardized tests.
I agree with the philosophy. Foundations of learning should not be built on use of Google as a search engine. Foundations should he a mix of the things necessary for brain and personality development. Its synonymous to the debate about letting kids use calculators for simple (or not so simple ) math problems.
“The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.” In my experience this may be empirically false. My 4 year old could barely count, but after spending 2 months in the summer playing a couple of iPad games, he's adding 2 digit numbers and subtracting 1 digit numbers, and doing simple math puzzles. His elder brother couldnt do those till Kindergarten, and I dont thi…
It's also pretty clear to me that equating computing to the use of Word, Excel, and Google leads one to the conclusion that computing is easy and not a big deal to pick up. Naturally, as a software engineer, I disagree vehemently with that.
I think that some level of real (not turtle or other games) programming should be taught from middle school on to the point where a HS grad can successfully write a small program to deal with the small needs of life: things like accounting, sophisticated searching for files, etc.
I believe - have faith - that a programming-enabled population can do some pretty amazing things when set free to do them. All it takes is the knowledge and the eyes to see what can be automated to do so.
My sister-in-law has taught at a Waldorf school for years. The school the article describes sounds typical. Waldorf is actually based on an extremely deviant philosophy. They get away with it because they deliver results. In particular, their kids routinely decimate all standardized tests.
> In particular, their kids routinely decimate all standardized tests. Out of every 10 tests they have 9 standardized tests club a randomly-chosen 10th standardized test to death?