[Edu-sig] Computer Hatred

[Gerrit Holl]

Shelley Walsh wrote:
> Subject: [Edu-sig] Computer Hatred

After reading your e-mail message, I think a better subject would read:
Computer illiteracy.

> Basically the discovery that I am making over and over is that students that
> have trouble with just the kinds of mathematical topics that I would have
> thought some experience with Python would help with, are even more terrified
> of computers than they are of mathematics.

> It isn't just Python, either, for all the talk about use of computers in the
> mathematics classroom as dumbing down, my recent experience is that students
> find it harder with computers rather than easier.

Since 6 weeks, I am a physics student and I have a lot of Calculus. Part of
my Calculus course is an introduction to Maple. I quickly saw that Maple
would really be able to help me a lot, but even for me (being experienced
with Python and computers in general), it is a large barrier to type some
integral from my Calculus textbook into Maple in order to check whether it
gives the same result as I calculated. This is because it is so new: I am
not used to it. At the start, it is hard indeed, because it is not
intuitive. Instead of using Maple to solve the Maple exercises, some of
my co-students used their TI-83 calculater to do so. This illustartes the
same reflex exists at a 'higher' level. I think it is a temporary reflex,
solvable by doing more exercises, and maybe doing a few steps back.

> I had statistics students
> who even in a distance education class where they were supposed to submit
> their assignments on Excel spreadsheets, would go so far as to submit
> something that was in tabular form in a textbox carefully using the space
> bar to get things to line up correctly. I had several others who would type
> without the = sign almost exactly the calculations that Excel would have
> done for them in a cell, and then repeat the same keystrokes in their
> calculators, and then type the answer displayed in the calculator.

I don't think this as anything to do with computer hatred or computer fear.
It is simpler than that: it is computer ignorance.

> I am ideally very attracted to the ideas that Kirby has about integrating
> mathematics and programming, but my recent experience is suggesting caution.
> I am very much interested in your opinions about this.

A problem with using computers and programming in education is that
typically, a lot of differences exist between the students pre-knowledge.
This is especially true in poorer socio-economic areas of society.
For people (for me at least) grown up in the "West", it is almost
unbelievable that an adult person does not know about computers, but
a few years ago the former Dutch prime minister turned out not to know
how to use the computer mouse. If students who do not have a computer at
home, nor have ever used any, are told to go programming, it is a
natural reaction to have fear for this. It is simply 10 steps too far.

yours,
Gerrit Holl.

-- 
142. If a woman quarrel with her husband, and say: "You are not
congenial to me," the reasons for her prejudice must be presented. If she
is guiltless, and there is no fault on her part, but he leaves and
neglects her, then no guilt attaches to this woman, she shall take her
dowry and go back to her father's house.
        -- 1780 BC, Hammurabi, Code of Law
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