Give kids Microsoft Excel and they'll find ways to have fun with it http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/microsoft-excel-artworks/
Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#22Why the hell are we teaching kids how to use a hammer in Woodshop? After all, it's useless knowledge unless you become a carpenter, right, and how many people choose that as a career?
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#23I showed my son Excel and he played with it over the next few days and showed his best friend - adding and dividing and multiplying lots of numbers at once was interesting for a while.
It's not that it replaced keepeeupee as recreation, but it probably changed the way he interprets the world a little bit because it came at a critical age.
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#24Here's an anectode in support of Excel. My 12 y.o. son was doing a project on seasons and climates, and he asked me whether it rains more in cold weather. And he gave me a certain line of reasoning.
Since real teaching moments can be hard to come by, I suggested we not stop there, but look at the data. Climate information is readily available on the internet, and we used Excel to plot out whether there were correlations.
Excel on its own has little value, but as a tool, it can make analysis painless and encourage people to form hypothesis and check them out quickly.
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#25Why are we teaching thirteen year olds how to use the quadratic formula? Why are we teaching seventeen year olds how to do integrals or multiply matrices? I mean, I am all for letting kids be kids, but if school was limited to what find's interesting, it would be nothing but gossip, sex, drugs, and video games.
Are you really comparing Excel's place in computing to the Quadratic formula's place in mathematics?
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#26Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#27Why are we teaching thirteen year olds how to use the quadratic formula? Why are we teaching seventeen year olds how to do integrals or multiply matrices? I mean, I am all for letting kids be kids, but if school was limited to what find's interesting, it would be nothing but gossip, sex, drugs, and video games.
Are you really comparing Excel's place in computing to the Quadratic formula's place in mathematics?
no, i am comparing excel's place in the life of a kid to the quadratic formula's