I'm in the middle of showing my precalculus students how vectors are used to move objects in programming to make (say) a video game (or maybe that's "old school" and so what should I say, "xbox game"? ...).
Last week I had them work through a word problem that stepped them through the basics. So here we have the reading skills come into play again. They had to really work at parsing through information to see what a diagram meant and what was meant by notation. Then today we did some basic programming on the graphing calculator. They're so psyched when a message they coded to be displayed actually gets displayed. WooHoo. ... So far we're having fun.
Of course Tuesday is our ELA TAKS test, so most/all teaching gets put on hold. This is our state test for graduation/NCLB.
I was in junior high during the early 80s and loved learning BASIC and then Pascal.
ReplyDeleteI asked an 8th grade math teacher if kids today still did that and she said only on their TI's. She said that never even get around to teaching Boolean logic - AND, OR, and such. Gosh.
Hi Heidi,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. It's such a fun (and useful and used) topic that seems to be one of the first dropped. ... We used to teach logic in geometry, but if we have to prepare for the state test, that's one of the topics that's first out the window.
Ms. Cookie
I've worked with my own kids (ages 9 and 6) about AND and OR using (peanut butter and jelly) sandwiches versus (peanut butter or jelly) sandwiches.
ReplyDeleteWe also graphed who liked their bagels toasted and/or buttered or just left alone.