7/31/2023 0 Comments Mynotes wont save in notefolio![]() ![]() But in high school chemistry, physics, etc. They’ll end up with a better intuitive understanding of logarithms and significant digits and error bounds after regularly using a slide rule for even a few weeks than any amount of reading about it or doing formal algebraic manipulation.Įlectronic calculators give students a very misleading impression that all of the digits printed on its display are meaningful. No, learning how to use a slide rule makes sense in an algebra course for ~15-year-old secondary math students who are learning about logarithms, and for 15–17-year-old secondary science students. > Learning a slide rule as you say makes sense in a history of maths course In the 1960s and before it might have made sense to get students performing the role of human computer, but nowadays it is anachronistic. The important thing for numerical analysts about different root-finding methods (etc.) is their convergence speed, numerical stability, computational complexity, and so on. In a post-introductory-calculus “numerical analysis” course, the exams should consist of writing proofs, not performing algorithms. If you want a nice introductory calculus book organized along more computer-focused and conceptual lines, take a look at (For example you could give the students rulers and printed graphs of a function – without any symbolic expression written down – and ask them to sketch approximately what a solution using Newton’s method would look like). On a timed in-class exam in an introductory calculus course, there are much better ways of judging someone’s understanding than making them perform a bunch of tedious and error-prone number crunching. If a general-purpose programming language seems too much, get them implementing these simple tools in desmos or geogebra. That time is much better spent than doing 4 or 5 examples of each with a handheld calculator. Both of these are very simple and students can learn enough of some simple programming language to implement them both in a very short amount of time. There’s really not much pedagogical value in using a handheld calculator to apply Newton’s method to some root-finding problem or apply Euler’s method (forward differences) to model a differential equation. I could plausibly believe that upper-division engineering courses benefit from handheld calculators – I have no experience with those – but foisting $100 calculators on every high school student is a tremendous scam.Ĭomputers are plenty available in “study groups and tutorials” (for one thing almost all college students and many high school students now have smartphones, and most college students also have laptops and/or tablets, but if you want a cheap computer just for math class, get a netbook or cheap android tablet and external keyboard or something made from a raspberry pi or. The students might even learn something about significant figures. If you want something portable a slide rule is entirely sufficient for anything that might come up in high school or intro undergrad level science courses. If people need to process data resulting from physical experiments they should use a machine with a full-sized keyboard and a real programming language. ![]() ![]() Without an electronic calculator students can’t be expected to do as much mindless number crunching, so instead the problems can be made much more interesting, unique, and conceptually challenging.įrankly the same goes for science courses. The point of math courses is learning to think, not learning to avoid fat-fingering tiny buttons or learning the specific crappy interface of some anachronistic antique machine. There is no reason for any math course at any level to ever need a calculator, period. Now the math department? They were a different story. ![]()
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