Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Math from Three to Seven

thepsmiths.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 225 posts

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#101

Post by tempfile »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #80

This was a surprisingly interesting and well-written article. I hope people read it and not just the comments here :-) I'm unsure if it implies that "lame school exercises" are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I've recently read articles about how teaching "insight" without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work). Does anyone have good experiences with keeping…

School is where you kid spends the majority of the time. If they find it boring, and the school is unable/unwilling to provide enrichment, then it is an uphill battle to resist that. The ideal solution is to make the work they do at school engaging, then they'll seek out enrichment at home themselves.

There might be math-oriented stuff online (3Blue1Brown is one off the top of my head) that keeps them wanting to understand more. That might anchor their school work a bit, or give them something extra to try. Books can help too.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#102

Post by 082349872349872 »

tempfile wrote: post #101
kreyenborgi wrote: post #80

This was a surprisingly interesting and well-written article. I hope people read it and not just the comments here :-) I'm unsure if it implies that "lame school exercises" are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I've recently read articles about how teaching "insight" without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work). Does anyone have good experiences with keeping…

School is where you kid spends the majority of the time. If they find it boring, and the school is unable/unwilling to provide enrichment, then it is an uphill battle to resist that. The ideal solution is to make the work they do at school engaging, then they'll seek out enrichment at home themselves. There might be math-oriented stuff online (3Blue1Brown is one off the top of my head) that keeps them wanting to unde…

Being a product of the US school system, the most important lesson it taught me is that teachers as well as students are caught up in a system that's bigger than they are, so in order to educate oneself, one need merely (a) organise one's own time effectively, but (b) avoid doing so indiscreetly, such that it could force other pawns to call one's lack of genuine participation to the attention of the Man.

90% of success in primary and secondary schooling is just showing up; as long as you keep your grades up, they won't demand mental attendance, only the physical.

  denn meine Gedanken zerreißen die Schranken
  und Mauern entzwei: die Gedanken sind frei.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#103

Post by kreyenborgi »

082349872349872 wrote: post #96
kreyenborgi wrote: post #80

This was a surprisingly interesting and well-written article. I hope people read it and not just the comments here :-) I'm unsure if it implies that "lame school exercises" are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I've recently read articles about how teaching "insight" without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work). Does anyone have good experiences with keeping…

have you tried TFA's tack of, instead of throwing him on the mercy of the school exercises, presenting a problem or two? > " Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back " —PH

In a small way, yes, and throughout "three to seven", actually up until she was nine, we had a lot of fun with what I think I can call problems (especially while home-schooling during the pandemic, where we had time to keep going back to these from different angles). But I'm not able drum up much interest these days, so I was wondering if people here had any insights on what if anything has worked with tweens, as opposed to how the younger ones learn.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#104

Post by mathnmusic »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #103
082349872349872 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tried TFA's tack of, instead of throwing him on the mercy of the school exercises, presenting a problem or two? > " Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back " —PH

In a small way, yes, and throughout "three to seven", actually up until she was nine, we had a lot of fun with what I think I can call problems (especially while home-schooling during the pandemic, where we had time to keep going back to these from different angles). But I'm not able drum up much interest these days, so I was wondering if people here had any insights on what if anything has worked with tweens, as opp…

Try dropping him in one of these math discord groups (for eg: Summer of Math Exposition)? Teens care a lot about social approval and seeing so many people having fun with math might help.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#105

Post by 082349872349872 »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #103
082349872349872 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tried TFA's tack of, instead of throwing him on the mercy of the school exercises, presenting a problem or two? > " Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back " —PH

In a small way, yes, and throughout "three to seven", actually up until she was nine, we had a lot of fun with what I think I can call problems (especially while home-schooling during the pandemic, where we had time to keep going back to these from different angles). But I'm not able drum up much interest these days, so I was wondering if people here had any insights on what if anything has worked with tweens, as opp…

I learned basic trig around ~10 because I wanted to make spacewar/asteroids-like games, which led naturally into matrix math, later on.

Parsing also interested me around ~12 (text games this time), but while I made some mechanical attempts, the theory never clicked until much later.

Sometime around that time I learned about recursion by reverse-engineering the display code for a tile based first-person maze crawler one of my father's colleagues had written. (yes, fib should've been simpler, but drawing those perspective walls was way more concrete)

[perspective was luckily something I'd been introduced to in second grade, so it was old hat at this point, and the scaling math was straightforward; the only jump I needed to make was grokking that having drawn the walls visible from this square, one could use the same routine, with fresh parameters, to draw the walls from all the still-visible neighbouring squares, etc. Unfortunately z-buffers make this entire approach obsolete; but maybe he'd take it as a challenge? this is trivial with z-buffering, but how might it even be possible without?]

Might Processing sketches (or whatever the new shiny might be) interest your kid?

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#106

Post by sersi »

082349872349872 wrote: post #105
kreyenborgi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a small way, yes, and throughout "three to seven", actually up until she was nine, we had a lot of fun with what I think I can call problems (especially while home-schooling during the pandemic, where we had time to keep going back to these from different angles). But I'm not able drum up much interest these days, so I was wondering if people here had any insights on what if anything has worked with tweens, as opp…

I learned basic trig around ~10 because I wanted to make spacewar/asteroids-like games, which led naturally into matrix math, later on. Parsing also interested me around ~12 (text games this time), but while I made some mechanical attempts, the theory never clicked until much later. Sometime around that time I learned about recursion by reverse-engineering the display code for a tile based first-person maze crawler o…

Personally, that's how most of my math learning came. As a teen, I started to program and wanted to understand mathematics tools to solve specific problems, so I learned trig, Bezier curves, cryptography, number theory, etc like this.

Then later between my love of point and click adventure games and puzzles plus the fact that I had good foundations in maths, pure mathematics problems became increasingly fun.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#107

Post by throw_pm23 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #74
qup wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also > Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?

The truth is, the Soviet bloc consistently made lower quality stuff or had much poorer training. There's are a persistent set of myths that both the Soviets and the western arms manufacturers like to perpetuate. The t-34 tank was the greatest tank ever (sometimes had 10:1 losses offset by 14:1 manufacturing) The ak-47 is the best due to is reliability (poor tolerances made it both reliable and astoundingly inaccurate…

Even Napoleon's weapons were vastly superior to the Russian ones at the time... oh, wait :)

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#108

Post by blackbear_ »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #80

This was a surprisingly interesting and well-written article. I hope people read it and not just the comments here :-) I'm unsure if it implies that "lame school exercises" are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I've recently read articles about how teaching "insight" without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work). Does anyone have good experiences with keeping…

> Does anyone have good experiences with keeping kids math-interested as they get into their teens?

Not a parent, but what kept me engaged at that time was programming simple games or interesting visualizations and animations. I "discovered" quite a bit of useful trigonometry, linear algebra and statistics by just fooling around and following my curiosity. And the intuition I gained definitely helped later on with university math

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#109

Post by richardw »

eru wrote: post #97
richardw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn’t that happened already? As someone who started coding a long time ago and who did it for fun, I’ve seen the industry move from enthusiasts to mainstream and finally to massive comp optimisers who spend more time on angling for a promotion than building. I’ve fallen in and out of enjoyment of engineering many times. But I still come back because I love making something that adds value. There will always be space…

You say it like trying to get paid well is a bad thing?

No human on earth doesn’t want to get paid well. Some are purely mercenary. Those I would prefer not to work with or hire.

(There are a lot of caveats. Someone might have always worked for jerks and has checked out, etc.)

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#110

Post by 082349872349872 »

d--b wrote: post #89

The main cultural difference is that Americans don’t value maths and physics as much as they value law and business. Harvard Law school is still the thing you aim for when you’re a smart kid. MIT is what you aim when you’re good AND you’re really into it. In France, the top thing to do is go to Polytechnique, which is an engineer school created by Napoleon. So culturally French people push their kids towards learning…

the provenance is unclear, but somehow Napoleon wound up with both a construction problem and a theorem to his name

(if your kid has neither aptitude nor taste for maths, what do you do? push them towards ENA?)

Post reply on HN