[Edu-sig] Order of operations confusion

[Charles Cossé]

Hello All,

Just thought I'd relay a rather interesting story: Last night I was
having my son work-out a simple problem from a new little webapp that
I coded up called "MakeItTrue" (
http://www.asymptopia.org/MakeItTrue.html ) which had 3 arbitrary
variables embedded into a larger equation, and the objective is to
simply choose 3 values which make a true equality of the thing....

So, the equation we were dealing with was something like:
82+b*c-51=d-13, and the thing that surprised me was that he didn't
think it was legal to take 82-51 before having dealt with the b*c term
... on account of the "MyDearAuntSally..." or "BODMAS" ... or whatever
acronyms they teach in school ... he had no idea that he could do
that, merely because it had been driven-home in his head that
multiplication must always be done first ...

Well, I thought that was rather significant, so thought I'd pass it
along to you all.

Take care out there,

-Charles

-- 
AsymptopiaSoftware|Software at theLimit
          http://www.asymptopia.org