moiram%tekcae.cax.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Moira Mallison) (11/04/88)
We've talked (in other forums if not this one) about the socialization of children toward particular careers, about how well males and females do in different subjects in elementary school and what effects it has on their futures, about our own experiences of being encouraged, discouraged or ignored with respect to our own learning experiences. Now I have a real life situation in my young niece. Heather is 8 and is just starting bounce back from the trauma of her parent's divorce a couple years ago. She has loved reading from the time she first learned (an escape of sorts, I expect), and has progressed rapidly to a level 2-3 years beyond her age (though her vocabulary seems to be a little beyond her comprehension). But math is another matter. She manages to keep up, but she doesn't like it much. When thinking about what I could do to work with her, to fire some enthusiasm, I realized that what I needed to do was make math fun. The second realization was that this is a real challenge, because *I* don't think it's fun. Anybody got any ideas how to make it fun for both of us? Moira Mallison
bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) (11/08/88)
In article <5756@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> moiram%tekcae.cax.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Moira Mallison) writes: >Anybody got any ideas how to make [math] fun for both of us? Math is fun when it's used to solve real problems. Some possibilities: 1. Put some money in a savings account. Calculate how much you'll have after 1 month, 2 months, etc. 2. Making change. 3. Calculating sales tax on a purchase. 4. Set up an imaginary (or real!) lemonade stand. Given the cost of materials, figure out how much to charge so you'll make a profit. 5. Figure out how much you can make from the stand in a day, in a week. 6. On car trips, whenever you pass a sign that says how many more miles, calculate how long it will take. Throw in some rest stops to make it more complicated. 7. On car trips, do the speedometer checks. 8. If you jump off the roof, figure how fast you'll be going when you hit the ground. 9. Figure out the miles-per-gallon you're getting. 10. With a growing kid, you can have some fun measuring her height vs time, and graphing it.
marla@Sun.COM (Marla Parker) (11/09/88)
Making math fun...I would say the best thing to do is play games
that require logical thinking and/or math. Two games come to
mind immediately - Five (which I've mentioned here before) and
Khala, or Calla, or Boa, or some Chinese name I can't remember.
Since your niece likes reading so much, she might enjoy Five,
since it is a word guessing game. After playing it (or maybe
playing Four, which would be easier), you can
show her how it is related to math. Each word is a set of
letters, and the answers are the number of unique elements
in the intersection of the guessed word and the secret word.
Sounds awful, but it would be fun and easy to see if you drew
the sets (words) as circles with the elements (letters) floating
inside, and overlap the circles where the intersection is, with
the common letters in the intersection of the circles.
The other game, Khala, is ancient and common to many cultures.
I learned in in Jr. High school math class or club or something.
There are numerous variations. The rules are very simple (I
think a child of 6 could play) but the potential for strategy
is enormous, especially when you play with more pebbles.
I'll post the rules in 2 seperate articls.
Marla Parker (415)336-2538
{major backbone}!sun!marla
marla@sun.comgds@spam.istc.sri.com (Greg Skinner) (11/13/88)
Here's some things I did/had as a child that encouraged my interest in math: Have a lot of math books around. If your child likes to read, odds are they'll pick the books up and look at them. The books don't have to be technical; books of fun math puzzles should suffice. I had some math books from Isaac Asimov (Realm of Numbers and Realm of Algebra) which introduced me to real and imaginary numbers, square roots, etc., long before I ever had to use them. Play card games. I used to spend lots of time playing cards with my sister and my mother. Playing cards gets one acclimated to thinking about probability and combinatorics. Playing chess and backgammon also helps. I suppose any game where some type of strategy is involved will develop creative logical thinking in the child. I used to play with compasses. I started out by just drawing circles, but eventually I discovered you could use them to bisect angles, insrcribe squares, etc. If mechanical drawing is offered, encourage your child to take it (at the same time with geometry if possible). Taking mechanical drawing helped both my sister and myself in geometry. --gregbo
lsc@Sun.COM (Lisa S Chabot) (11/17/88)
The MIT Museum Shop Catalog has, as usual, a number of things that might appeal to kids and which don't have the humdrum of elementary school drills. That's what I always hated--the dull stuff in the regular books. Maybe this is true for other kids too. Anyway, don't force anything, but here are some intriguing ideas: The Childrens Mathematics Calendar 1989 (#860 $6.95) Games for Math, by Peggy Kaye (#704 $8.95) (224 pages, softcover, ages 6-10) [says "Unlike the counting drills and workbooks that have bored children [HA! --lsc] for generations, the 60 entertaining math games offered here are guaranteed to foster mathophilia rather than mathophobia."] If you feel adventurous, there are also a couple of robot kits (I believe no soldering is involved). If you don't already get this catalog for some reason, I imagine you can contact the museum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology The MIT Museum Shop 265 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 (617) 253-4462 phone orders m-f 9-5est s&s 12-4est I haven't seen either of these items (*yet*), and being no longer 7, I'm not an effective reviewer anyway. Other sources for interesting toys are the gift shops of your local science museums. For that matter visiting local science museums, sometime when it's not swamped, ought to be fun. ---lsc All power corrupts, but we need electricity.