[OT] HyperCard and the Interactive Web

[Richmond]

On 02/26/2012 08:42 PM, Mark Wieder wrote:
> Richmond-
>
> Sunday, February 26, 2012, 10:14:47 AM, you wrote:
>
>> A slide-rule helps children (and adults!) visualise numbers and their
>> relations to one another;
>> a calculator does not.
> As does an analog clock: there's a mathematical affinity that grows
> out of visualizing the relationships between numbers that does not
> lend itself to the display of digits on a computer screen or watch.
> There is otherwise no cognitive difference between "five minutes to
> ten" and "twenty minutes to ten".
>

Well said that man!

This why I start programming classes with beads/buttons and cups/dishes.

It is also why I often play with things on the carpet (LEGO, buttons, 
beads, string)
before, during and after programming.

While I am capable of abstract thought (and, at 50, it is becoming 
ever-more abstract),
I find, along with the 99.9% of people on the planet who are not 
screaming geniuses,
it very helpful indeed to have some sort of physical model to work with.

Try and explain a duckbilled platypus to someone who has not seen one or 
a photo of one;
try and do it without any reference whatsoever to any other life form 
(ducks, otters, etc.)
aand you will have a serious mental block.

Computers, lest we forget, just crunch numbers at the most basic level.

Programs just move data around; or, put it another way; they shift 
buttons between cups.

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Years ago my Dad, who was not interested in computer programming (think 
1976) and thought
I was just going through a teenage phase, gave me a book on BASIC; it 
was utter crap because it
started off with words such as CONSTANT and VARIABLE, STRING and ARRAY; 
ugh; what were and
are those things?

Luckily for me, between a wonderful Maths teacher ('Bonehead' Barker) 
who could explain these words like this:-

CONSTANT;  a cup containing a fixed number of beads.

VARIABLE;  a cup that can have as many or as few beads as you want.

STRING; a cup with a letter/postcard from Granny stuffed inside it.

ARRAY; a tray holding a certain number of cups.

And another wonderful Maths teacher (David Exham) who could make models 
with cup and beads that made coherent sense and 'worked':

I got "it", or, perhaps, at the risk of making one of the worst puns of 
all time, I got "IT".

The only "bad" side to this is that I, now, have absolutely no problem 
visualising fairly abstract stuff as shifting beads around between cups.

Of course the chaps who wrote the "Easy Guide to BASIC" should have been 
taken out and set to clean toilets as they hadn't a clue about
how human brains conceptualise, nor about Reader Response Theory.

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Later on, at my first University (Durham) I wrote a concordance program 
in PASCAL 5 that relied heavily on multi-dimensional arrays;
but as I wrote most of it in a notebook sitting amongst the stacks of 
the University library I had no real visualisation problem at all.

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So; Yer, maybe we shoudl consider going "back to the future" in terms of 
how IT classes are laid out.

Richmond Mathewson.