[math4] FourthGradeMath Digest, Vol 2, Issue 15

[Shawn Willden]

On Saturday 14 March 2009 10:48:17 am Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote:
> The only hesitation I have here is if we allow long pedagogical
> discussions to slow down work.

Avoiding slowdowns is important, but there's also a risk of quickly producing 
poor content.

I spent a couple of years writing K-12 math ed software while in college, 
(almost 20 years ago now, so I no longer have any of the old software, and my 
recall of the details is fuzzy) and one of the things I learned is that 
giving a programmer a task like "write a program to teach this concept" is 
rarely very effective.  What comes out is something that makes sense to the 
guy/gal who wrote it, but isn't necessarily at all enlightening to the target 
audience.

What did work well was to get a small number of outstanding math teachers in a 
room along with a couple of math ed-focused university profs and a developer 
or two to keep the discussion within the bounds of feasibility.  We'd have 
the teachers discuss how they taught concepts and then brainstorm as a group 
on how to use the interactive and dynamic capabilities of software to enhance 
the proven teaching approaches.  This didn't take long; in the course of a 
two-hour meeting we typically scoped out a dozen or more program concepts in 
adequate detail for the developers to run with them.

I think a mailing list discussion would work just as well.  The key is to have 
some really good fourth-grade math teachers involved.  If the project doesn't 
have any yet, we need to recruit some.

	Shawn.