[Edu-sig] Fwd: Which way did the chicken cross the road?

[Jason Cunliffe]

A nice story from a discussion elsewhere on XML... 
[Assumptions, formatting, parsing components and their designers]

Joel Neely wrote:
> EWD told a wonderful story about giving an individualized test where
> the student is presented with a problem and is expected to "think
> aloud" while designing a solution on the board in the professor's
> presence.  The problem he described involves achieving a specified
> condition in a single pass across a one-dimensional array, where the
> obvious solution would sweep back-and-forth multiple times.  He had
> been accustomed (over many uses of this problem) to seeing the
> students end up with some processing upon elements in "increasing"
> (left-to-right) positional order.
> 
> He was surprised by a student from Israel, who developed an equally
> valid solution which swept the array in *decreasing* (right-to-left)
> positional order.  He wondered how much growing up reading r-to-l
> Hebrew instead of a l-to-r European language influenced the way the
> student conceptualized the problem.
> 
> Makes one wonder, doesn't it?!

./Jason