As I am a physicist, the banner headline on your post attracted me. Opening the link, revealed it was about using smartphones. I don’t have one thank goodness, a simple dumb phone is my choice. Hence I didn’t follow the link any further.

Andrew.

I for one would appreciate a little more information about the content when people post links – so I can decide whether or not it might be of interest (without having to follow the link to find out).

Michael – yours was nothing like as infuriating as the many links to random YouTube videos which give no idea of the subject matter.

I am glad other people found the link worthwhile. Just that I am not a fan of smart phones, They are expensive and the purchase of bandwidth is not cheap,. I have better uses for the money I save. by not having one.

I am just starting to build a cloud chamber which will allow schoolchildren to observe the tracks of alpha particles, from a radioactive source and also secondary cosmic rays.

The first one I built some 60 years ago spent a very long time entertaining undergraduates at one of the better known university physics departments

Enjoy your smartphones or not as the case may be,

Andrew.

Interesting… and I was not a teacher or physicist (but worked at shop-floor level in physics and engineering), and I choose not to own a “smart”-‘phone.

Nor did I ever find learning anything mathematical, easy.

Yet I don’t recall problems with the concepts of distance, time, position, etc; at least at a basic level without delving into calculus, etc.

So what is happening there that so many youngsters find such everyday ideas hard enough, that adding numbers to them needs artificial aids like ‘phone “apps” to help them?

The software and that paper are American and they seem to teach mathematics in a very different way to UK schools, breaking it into separate areas almost as individual curriculum subjects. I doubt that explains it though. The message seems that many students find simple Theoretical Mechanics, and even just graphs, very hard to comprehend; but why? Presumably they manage to learn any other mathematics of comparable level.

Although I am one the least numerate people I know, I found such matters reasonably simple because they relate to real objects doing real things; not pure abstractions like matrices and Euclidean Geometry. I felt the authors have missed something, despite (or because of?) being teachers, so have found a fancy way to solve the effects!

I don’t know how Maths and Physics are taught in UK schools nowadays, as I am not a parent trying to help a child with homework involving away-with-the-fairies just for times sums; but do they need ‘phone “apps” for it?

Very strange…..

Being “computer literate” in that sense usually means knowing only how to use particular software on particular instruments, but there are plenty well into their Age of Sagacity who are more with it with IT; having been exposed to far a greater range of computers, software and purposes over the years. (My first brush was with MS-DOS!)

The ‘phone might be a teaching aid and of course no-one wants teaching-by-bullying, or even by rote, which merely show incompetent teachers. I questioned the apparent need for such a theatrical “aid”.

Basic Physics is the real world: things move, heat up, use electricity, etc.

Maths is different. It makes sense to teach it by anchoring it where possible to real things, but some topics are too opaque for that, needing a particular gift or brain physiology or something to grasp them. Or very good teachers.

My own example is why Matrices are impossible for me even at basic level, but I always found 3-D co-ordinates relatively easy.  Prof. Charles (‘Lewis Carroll’) Dodgson’s invention is utterly abstract, its uses hardly secondary-school stuff. Whereas (x, y, z) is like the relief notation on a map, or modelled by cutting two sides off a carton. Similarly “Proving” that ABCD is a Cyclic Quadrilateral needs a strange mind indeed; but you don’t need be Jerome K. Jerome to compehend a vector by imagining a boat crossing a river.

Here though, the suggested portable phone as a teaching aid seems either to make a fundamentally simple, everyday subject needlessly complicated; or to miss asking if many schoolchildren cannot mentally bridge between paper description and everyday observation.

If the latter, why?

By all means use effective teaching aids, and my own school had well-equipped labs; but ask what they are aiding, and why, first.

Though really, I suspect the truth is the writers simply want to sell their software!

””’

I once contributed to a site called “Answers.com”, part of Wikipedia. It had sections on all sorts of general-knowledge subjects, including a lot of Maths and Science. Sometimes I answered queries from American swimming-pool owners trying to calculate the dose rates of disinfectants sold in metric quantities, for pools measured in Imperial units, for example. I would show them the working, step by step (being careful to use US Gallons where necessary).

It also hosted many queries apparently from American school pupils baffled by homework about metric/imperial conversions. I would not simply help them cheat by giving only the answer as others did, but would walk through the question, explaining that you look up the appropriate constant and multiply the given value by it, and showing the working.

Sadly this section was bedevilled by two fools deliberately being as baffling as possible. They would show a screen-full of complexity, call it “Dimensional Analysis” and cite “Algebra” books without using algebra. How many km in so-many miles? Not simple (km = miles X 8/5). These two would turn the miles to feet, the km to cm, then back again, step after step… and make mistakes in their own arithmetic. Goodness knows what the teachers made of copies of their gobbledegook!

Pedants corner: Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll invented determinants not matrices. Related but different. Matrices invented by Cayley IIRC.  There’s a story that when Queen Victoria visited Oxford she was introduced to Dodgson who by then was famous as Carroll and she asked about his “new book” meaning Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He presented her with a copy of his latest book on determinants! I’m not sure she was amused…