On Thu, 26 Nov 2015 02:59 am, Laura Creighton wrote: > The great sticking point for the children I am teaching is > '*' means multiplication. You can really see that some people > have to make extensive mental modifications in order to handle > the concept that mathematical truths are expressed in linguistic > and orthographic conventions, and that one can swap out a particular > convention 'x means multiply' and swap in another one '* means > multiply' while leaving the underlying truth unchanged.
Wow. What age children are you talking about? I wasn't introduced to programming in any real depth until uni, after graduating secondary school. I had lots of problems understanding bits of it, and so did many of my fellow students, but * for multiplication wasn't one of them. But by this time, we had already learned in secondary school that you can use any of the following to write multiplication: x × y x ⋅ y x y just as you can write division as: x / y x ÷ y Adding * to the list of ways to write multiplication wasn't hard. And I don't remember anyone having conceptual difficulty learning that xy is a short-cut for x×y in maths class. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
