[Edu-sig] (no subject)

[Dan Peirce]

The exploratory type of math that the high school is trying to teach
unfortunately can be extremely time consuming and off-putting. The
result is that I keep hearing "I hate math".
On more than one occasion when one of my kids asked for help with math
it occurred to me that we could gain insight into the problem using a
computer. On those occasions I typically turned to a spreadsheet for
the power it can give in quickly generating numerical results from
simple expressions that could take a long time to produce with pencil
an paper. This can make discerning patterns far less laborious.
The question that has been nagging me is why are the schools not
taking advantage of computers to teach math?
Recently I have started to play around with Python. In part because I
got my hands on a Raspberry Pi. So I came across Matplotlib and
IPython. One of the instructors at my University decided to use Python
in his 2nd year physics course where they are using differential
equations.
I have started looking for material related to python being used to
teach high school math.
So, I started googling Python Math K-12 to see what would come up. It
looks like a number of schools have combined Math and programming in
python.

http://pyvideo.org/video/437/pycon-2011--panel--python-in-schools--teaching-it
http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~tneller/resources/k12/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbeHdg8mtdc
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/python/33832

As a parent it is kind of tricky to have the right material on hand at
the right time for when any particular question comes up. Yesterday I
thought I'd see what can be done with fractions. I discovered that
there is a module for fractions but also that one can construct simple
functions for gcd and lcm and not use the fractions module. I'm
thinking this approach might be better for reviewing fractions.

If I do end up using python to help my 15 year old with her homework I
think that I had better be proficient at it or the demonstration will
go flat. I have python on our computer now so she could actually
explore it herself at any time.

Searching up material on the web has turned a lot up but to talk to my
daughter about it and educators as well it would be really helpful to
have a good book on hand. I have noticed there are some quite
divergent opinions on how to proceed. As a parent I need to be able to
support whatever they are currently doing so material that goes off on
different tangents won't be helpful.