Please look at a recent game - and then tell me how you'd just knock this up in a bit of machine code, more efficiently.
Most people don't write hard-core code, well mainly as somebody else has done it for them, allowing them to get on with something more productive.
I completely fail to see how they'd manage to undercut every single existing PC/component manufacturer out there.
Always thought they were missing a trick by not embracing benchmarking though. Your PC gets a steam score/analysis and it tells you how a particular game should run on your system before you buy it.
They could then make a few dollars off certifying platforms - i.e. you buy all these bits, it should be fine - but if you buy this complete Alienware system, then we can tell you right now, you'll get 60fps with everything racked to max.
Probably isn't too possible to be accurate in the world of ever changing drivers - but they could surely certify a few platforms (and get steam to maintain the latest drivers on them).
I'm all for it.
Multi-million dollar marketing, forcing release into a window is not always conducive to a completed product getting shipped.
I presume $40k is the only possible reason that somebody might decide to delay a much-fanfared release until it's ready.
Looking at it the other way, if patching was free, I suspect a shit-load more shoddy stuff would appear.
I'm not having a go at iterative development (minecraft), DLC etc - and I appreciate it when a publisher/developer pushes out a patch to correct an issue that they only came across after release.. Merely pointing out that cost-free patching would undoubtedly create a buggier experience for me.
I just attached a nyko zoom to my kinnect (set of lenses mounted in a frame that clips over the kinect) - and that knocked a very handy third off the minimum distance I need to be.
Aside from expense and size, there's no reason you couldn't have a kinect with motorized or even swivelling lenses.
In the UK, we have loads of magazines. 95% crap, but a good 5%. Should you come across a UK magazine outside of the UK, then it's likely to come from the 5%.
Feel free to enjoy it, but don't imagine it's representative of the quality of UK magazines as a whole.
Should you wish to buy then, it's usually easy enough to subscribe (http://www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/gaming/edge-magazine-subscription/) will let you take out a subscription to Edge.
Maybe of note is that I think the quality of many UK magazines is falling. High point in the late 90's, early 00's, but seems to be sliding. Possibly just the market sorting itself out though. Magazines that will survive are those with great big in-depth, well written articles. The more fragmented/thrown-together ones I, quite rightly, been lost to the online world.
because you don't need to.
Reason I'm excited about Raspberry Pi, is that it's designed as a learning tool. I want to play, tinker, blah blah.
Reason I find XMBC on RP exciting, is that this is something I could 'theoretically' make. Now I know full well I don't stand a chance, but definitely provides some inspiration.
The really interesting thing, is that with the hardware price so low, it suddenly means you could make a physical product based upon their hardware, your software and sell it for a reasonable price. Consider how 'app-stores' suddenly allowed so many people to be produce and distribute to a large market. Limitation there, is that every one of your customers has had to fork over a large pile of cash for their hardware. I can quite easily see how I might buy a stack of RP's and just swap a dedicated app between them. XMBC for my TVs. One plugged into a drive as the NAS. Few hosting commodity webcams to make them IP enabled etc
One of the lovely things about IT is that (theoretically) one person can make something that can instantly be used by millions.
Possibly that's a little bit optimistic, but the best motivation for anything I've made is somebody looking at something I've built and and just saying "I like that"
Or maybe even better - "I would like it even more if it did x", then building "x" and then getting the feedback (mainly when you realize not including x was a retarded over-sight).
I'm not quite sure how you support this in the design of the room, but maybe find a way of allowing those not in the class to see what's happening. Windows into the room, something that people can look at if they just wander in - maybe even just a 40" screen outside pointing to stuff available to all on a site of what's been made in the room that day.
I guess my point would be that the room shouldn't just be for people making things (50 ergonomic workstations are lovely - but they'll only ever look like 50 ergonomic workstations) - it should help show the rest of the world what's being produced in that room. 'Selling' what's being made isn't really for the people they're selling to, but to provide encouragement to the creators.
We need the rich guys to buy it first, so the rest of us can pick them up when they get mass market - if there is a mass market (which personally I think there is)
The first "motorized carriages" were quite definitely impractical toys for the rich. See also the first airplanes and pretty much "the first anythings"
In the UK we had 12 pence in the old shilling up until early 197? - I dunno, before my time.
If you're still using inches&feet, then there's another reason to include 12x
The failure to switch over to a full metric system, imho, indicates that eejits are in charge of the place.
(the most powerful handheld blah blah blah).
I've got no idea how to design, market, distribute or support a product - which is why I don't attempt to do it. I fully intend to pick up a Raspberry Pi, and to be honest power isn't the reason. The reason I want it is because I believe it a) will appear and b) will be supported.
The secondary reason is that it looks (last time I looked) like it would become an XBMC reference platform - i.e. if I can't summon the intellectual ability to do something with it, I can at least ride on the coat-tails of those that can.
I had a firm grasp of the concepts involved? I think I was mainly just musing on how we all read the same question, write the same answer, but handle the processing in a completely different way.
I'm fine with (basic) algebra - but it's always something I'd write down. I've never, for example, mentally drawn and solved an equation in my head.
Even when I'm solving these on paper, there's still a visual element. I know that x=1 is the same as 3x=3 - but I'm still imaging a pair of objects, one on each side of a line, that were the same size and have now both got 3 times larger.
Just drilling down into this thought, I can't imagine '3' as a complete abstract. I can imagine the character or more usually it's 3 'things' - the things aren't specific, but there's definitely 3 of them. When I go from 3x=3 -> x=1, I'm separating the group of 3 things into 3 separate groups of 1 thing, or just imagining a thing of size 3, shinking down to 1/3 of its size.
I'm intrigued as to what happens inside your skull when you do the same. Does your 3 exist as a complete abstract?
I'm not for one moment suggesting that my process is 'good', it's not and scales horrifically - but it's how at the lowest level my mind copes.
Incidentally, it's not just maths. If I think of 'fast', if whilst not picturing something, I feel something moving 'fast'.
I further wonder if people can be taught to change - if somebody explained to me a better '3', would that have helped me?
Finally - I notice I seem to be obsessing on '3' - some people might have just been more general 'integer' or just 'number' - but even to write this post I needed an actual example I could visualize before I could talk about it.
(Incidentally, 3 this evening were 3 little Go stones (black ones - I have no idea why)).
If you ask me 9*12, I'm still doing (10*12)-12
Nothing wrong with memorizing your 12-times table, just I can't see why you'd memorize that and not the 13-times.
My point (combined with that of another poster) is that if you teach up to 10x, the 11x and onwards seems a lovely point to break from rote learning and instead introduce long multiplication.
I'm not saying rote learning isn't important, it provides the foundations you need to build on. Additionally, as you perform mental arithmetic, you'll pretty much automatically memorize the 'sums' you use often. e.g. 25*3 I just know is 75. Doesn't mean I was ever told to learn 25*3 or 3*25 at primary school.
Then there's the ones you pick up later on, which are specific to what you do day to day. I know quite a few x*1024 multiples - but I'm not for one moment suggesting we formalize this for primary school children.
Not quite sure how it happened though - well I do. They were a startup and interviews were just nice little chats to see how we got on. Managed to staff ourselves with a wonderfully random selection of people (architects with doctorates in literature and all sorts).
Maybe the reason it worked is that it assumes that some people are curious and some aren't. As long as you're curious and have access to google, you can usually make a reasonable job of most things - and ENJOY the process.
I occasionally get drafted in to ask the technical questions on interviews. I feel like a fraud as I'm bluffing a bit on some of the questions - but then when the answers come back it's amazing how somebody who clearly knows their technologies/acronyms seems to completely screw up the answer. Really simple 'real world stuff' - "You have a dev team offshore, what steps would you take to ensure implementation is successful?"
No right answers, but half the interviewees seem to hear a different question and answer "I'll review every line of code that comes back" or "I'll ensure they are all certified on X". I much prefer somebody that considers that problems may start with them - "I'll give them my design to review and we'll all talk it through before anybody opens Eclipse."
My nice company got bought by evil-megacorp and it's slowly killing me. Now have an attitude that unless you're in the relevant department, certain areas are off-limits. Everybody now sits in their little silo and doesn't seem to care about anything they're not contractually responsible for and any (however polite) suggestion at how they could improve something is taken as a personal slight against them. Oh, and asking for help and advice is tantamount to admitting you're a cretin. My personal introduction to colleagues seems to consist of trying to drill into them "If the design looks bollocks, please tell me and we can talk it through, it's entirely likely I screwed up" and "Whilst sobbing over your PC to 4am to solve a problem might look great on your timesheet, wtf didn't you just ask me?"
I seem to have drifted completely off topic now, so I'll stop..
but just considering 140 and 150 - 150 is a nicer number to me.
One is visualized as 10x14, the other as 10x15 - so yes, both rectangles.
140 I see as being composed of 2 other rectangles bolted together - 2 10x7's
150 is 3 10x5s, but also 2 10x10s, with the top square only half filled in. If there's one thing I find easier than a rectangle to visualize, it's squares.
If I'm trying to visualize it, it's always easier for me to start with the 150 and then add or subtract from it as required. 150 is a nice rectangular shape I can hold on my head without too much effort. If I was say trying to hold 141, it would be a rectangle of 140 with an annoying little extra thing I'd have to remember with it.
Aggh, not explaining this well, probably best I'm not a teacher.
I think it just boils down to the fact that I firstly try to break the question down (obviously), but break it down into things I can hold easily in my head - and this guides how I choose to break it down. It's not the operations I find hard, it's the variables.
150 fits easily as say 'one visual unit'
141 is harder as just considering that number, I'm mentally holding that not as 141, but (14*10)+1. Everytime time I need to recall that number, there's 3 f'in parts of it to juggle, so I'd like to push these 'hard' variables towards the end of my thought process, so I have to deal with them for the absolutely minimum length of time.
Thinking it through even more, I have 'emotions' towards numbers. If I was just asked which number do I prefer, I'd choose 150 over 141. 150 feels friendly, 141 is a pain in the arse and I wish to spend as little time as possible even thinking about it.
In multiple choice, I probably have a multi-step approach.
Run through it without looking at the answers using my own strange inner whiteboard/counters/whatever I can conjure up to help me. If that hits an answer I feel smug.
If I look down and don't see anything that matches, then I'll switch to something else - e.g. if all trailing digits in the question are unique, then just focus on working out what that should be. Then probably a quick check using the ^10s to just check that I've got a figure that's not an order of magnitude out.
For example on the salary question, I looked at it as a 40 hour week, followed by a 30 hours week and knowing the real answer would be a smidge less than the ballpark number I came up with.
This is pretty much what kicked off my original comment. I'd never heard of it before and was trying to decipher wtf it was going on about - then suddenly I twigged that it was the closest thing I'd seen on paper to how my head was actually working.
Hurrah for progress - I just worry that it shouldn't replace the 'traditional' method. Seem to be plenty of people who quite happily just say they multiple 47*3 as a single mental process. I'd then be really fascinated to know if the people who do this do better in an environment that teaches this way - I always felt I was almost cheating - and then when my little self-taught shortcuts left me high and dry on the next level of problem I was stumped until I developed my own way of looking at it.
Which led to my issue between GCSE and A-level when the syllabus was racing forwards faster than I could come up with my own ways of understanding.
I think I'm pretty much the same speed on either, but I'm now trying to consider why.
I *think* it's because I'm again doing my maths visually.
I prefer 150-3*3...and I suspect I'm now going to lose people, but I'll try and explain
150 is a multiple of 10. In my head I've got a grid of 10*15 - well actually it's definitely (and always is) 10 wide and I'm vaguely aware it's 15 high, but I'm not focussing on this right now.
I take off 9 from 150, so I've done 10-9, to give me one left on my top row. I know I'm still on the top row, so I still have 140 as my 'foundation', and oh theres one 'thing' left over this, so I just add the one on to give me 141.
I'm getting strangely fascinated by all the different ways people are approaching the same very simple problem.
I'm 35, so maybe it's all changed now, but first bit of rote mathematical learning was out 1..12 times tables.
Even then most people learnt them off by heart, and I was adding and substracting to get the answers from previously learnt tables (I think it was something like we learnt one a week in ascending order).
Not for one moment saying learning them isn't necessary - but always seemed they were missing a trick. 1..9 makes sense. When you get to 10 I think it went a bit wrong. I seem to remember this was the 'easy' week, as you just needed to add a zero. Then the 11 times was easy, as 11,22,33,44 etc all very easy - until you get to 11*10 (which you pulled back from your 10* table).. but then 11*11 it all sort of fell down and people had to learn these.
Unless, you were me - 11*11 = 11*10 + 1*11
Maybe the trick that's missed is that once you've learnt up to your 10*, 11* should be explained as 10* + 1*, 12* as 10* + 2* etc.
Again, I'm guessing that depending upon age and school, many people are probably taught this - but I wasn't and it makes me feel a bit pissy:)
Just feel that if we exposed children to this right from the beginning - i.e. there are multiple ways of looking at questions, then going forward everytime they saw a new problem/type of question, they'd automatically start considering what worked best for them (and lock those synapses in place for the rest of their life).
I can understand he might get some wrong and have forgotten others - but none?
My best guess is that he's pissed off with how the school board is being run, he's tried to get things changed and nobody is listening.
So he wants to go public. How does he get attention?
"Board member doesn't like tests"
"Board member didn't do as well on tests as he thought he would"
"Board member cannot do anything on test"
In his position I'd be selecting the headline, and then just filling in the test to ensure I got the one I wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
Now wondering if you spray an aerosol into the chamber *thinks*
But I'm choosing to ignore it all, entirely based on font.
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lgrupp/CV.pdf
Please look at a recent game - and then tell me how you'd just knock this up in a bit of machine code, more efficiently.
Most people don't write hard-core code, well mainly as somebody else has done it for them, allowing them to get on with something more productive.
I completely fail to see how they'd manage to undercut every single existing PC/component manufacturer out there.
Always thought they were missing a trick by not embracing benchmarking though. Your PC gets a steam score/analysis and it tells you how a particular game should run on your system before you buy it.
They could then make a few dollars off certifying platforms - i.e. you buy all these bits, it should be fine - but if you buy this complete Alienware system, then we can tell you right now, you'll get 60fps with everything racked to max.
Probably isn't too possible to be accurate in the world of ever changing drivers - but they could surely certify a few platforms (and get steam to maintain the latest drivers on them).
I'm all for it.
Multi-million dollar marketing, forcing release into a window is not always conducive to a completed product getting shipped.
I presume $40k is the only possible reason that somebody might decide to delay a much-fanfared release until it's ready.
Looking at it the other way, if patching was free, I suspect a shit-load more shoddy stuff would appear.
I'm not having a go at iterative development (minecraft), DLC etc - and I appreciate it when a publisher/developer pushes out a patch to correct an issue that they only came across after release.. Merely pointing out that cost-free patching would undoubtedly create a buggier experience for me.
3d screens seem to be limping onto the market, but with a 3d camera... you're right, it's just going to be used for porn...
Were plenty of other annoyances lurking about after that. Network file 'sharing' (shares/CIF etc) was a world of pain and registry hacking.
I just attached a nyko zoom to my kinnect (set of lenses mounted in a frame that clips over the kinect) - and that knocked a very handy third off the minimum distance I need to be.
Aside from expense and size, there's no reason you couldn't have a kinect with motorized or even swivelling lenses.
In the UK, we have loads of magazines. 95% crap, but a good 5%. Should you come across a UK magazine outside of the UK, then it's likely to come from the 5%.
Feel free to enjoy it, but don't imagine it's representative of the quality of UK magazines as a whole.
Should you wish to buy then, it's usually easy enough to subscribe (http://www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/gaming/edge-magazine-subscription/) will let you take out a subscription to Edge.
Maybe of note is that I think the quality of many UK magazines is falling. High point in the late 90's, early 00's, but seems to be sliding. Possibly just the market sorting itself out though. Magazines that will survive are those with great big in-depth, well written articles. The more fragmented/thrown-together ones I, quite rightly, been lost to the online world.
because you don't need to.
Reason I'm excited about Raspberry Pi, is that it's designed as a learning tool. I want to play, tinker, blah blah.
Reason I find XMBC on RP exciting, is that this is something I could 'theoretically' make. Now I know full well I don't stand a chance, but definitely provides some inspiration.
The really interesting thing, is that with the hardware price so low, it suddenly means you could make a physical product based upon their hardware, your software and sell it for a reasonable price. Consider how 'app-stores' suddenly allowed so many people to be produce and distribute to a large market. Limitation there, is that every one of your customers has had to fork over a large pile of cash for their hardware. I can quite easily see how I might buy a stack of RP's and just swap a dedicated app between them. XMBC for my TVs. One plugged into a drive as the NAS. Few hosting commodity webcams to make them IP enabled etc
One of the lovely things about IT is that (theoretically) one person can make something that can instantly be used by millions.
Possibly that's a little bit optimistic, but the best motivation for anything I've made is somebody looking at something I've built and and just saying "I like that"
Or maybe even better - "I would like it even more if it did x", then building "x" and then getting the feedback (mainly when you realize not including x was a retarded over-sight).
I'm not quite sure how you support this in the design of the room, but maybe find a way of allowing those not in the class to see what's happening. Windows into the room, something that people can look at if they just wander in - maybe even just a 40" screen outside pointing to stuff available to all on a site of what's been made in the room that day.
I guess my point would be that the room shouldn't just be for people making things (50 ergonomic workstations are lovely - but they'll only ever look like 50 ergonomic workstations) - it should help show the rest of the world what's being produced in that room. 'Selling' what's being made isn't really for the people they're selling to, but to provide encouragement to the creators.
We need the rich guys to buy it first, so the rest of us can pick them up when they get mass market - if there is a mass market (which personally I think there is)
The first "motorized carriages" were quite definitely impractical toys for the rich. See also the first airplanes and pretty much "the first anythings"
In the UK we had 12 pence in the old shilling up until early 197? - I dunno, before my time.
If you're still using inches&feet, then there's another reason to include 12x
The failure to switch over to a full metric system, imho, indicates that eejits are in charge of the place.
(the most powerful handheld blah blah blah).
I've got no idea how to design, market, distribute or support a product - which is why I don't attempt to do it. I fully intend to pick up a Raspberry Pi, and to be honest power isn't the reason. The reason I want it is because I believe it a) will appear and b) will be supported.
The secondary reason is that it looks (last time I looked) like it would become an XBMC reference platform - i.e. if I can't summon the intellectual ability to do something with it, I can at least ride on the coat-tails of those that can.
I had a firm grasp of the concepts involved? I think I was mainly just musing on how we all read the same question, write the same answer, but handle the processing in a completely different way.
I'm fine with (basic) algebra - but it's always something I'd write down. I've never, for example, mentally drawn and solved an equation in my head.
Even when I'm solving these on paper, there's still a visual element. I know that x=1 is the same as 3x=3 - but I'm still imaging a pair of objects, one on each side of a line, that were the same size and have now both got 3 times larger.
Just drilling down into this thought, I can't imagine '3' as a complete abstract. I can imagine the character or more usually it's 3 'things' - the things aren't specific, but there's definitely 3 of them. When I go from 3x=3 -> x=1, I'm separating the group of 3 things into 3 separate groups of 1 thing, or just imagining a thing of size 3, shinking down to 1/3 of its size.
I'm intrigued as to what happens inside your skull when you do the same. Does your 3 exist as a complete abstract?
I'm not for one moment suggesting that my process is 'good', it's not and scales horrifically - but it's how at the lowest level my mind copes.
Incidentally, it's not just maths. If I think of 'fast', if whilst not picturing something, I feel something moving 'fast'.
I further wonder if people can be taught to change - if somebody explained to me a better '3', would that have helped me?
Finally - I notice I seem to be obsessing on '3' - some people might have just been more general 'integer' or just 'number' - but even to write this post I needed an actual example I could visualize before I could talk about it.
(Incidentally, 3 this evening were 3 little Go stones (black ones - I have no idea why)).
I seemingly think in Russian
If you ask me 9*12, I'm still doing (10*12)-12
Nothing wrong with memorizing your 12-times table, just I can't see why you'd memorize that and not the 13-times.
My point (combined with that of another poster) is that if you teach up to 10x, the 11x and onwards seems a lovely point to break from rote learning and instead introduce long multiplication.
I'm not saying rote learning isn't important, it provides the foundations you need to build on. Additionally, as you perform mental arithmetic, you'll pretty much automatically memorize the 'sums' you use often. e.g. 25*3 I just know is 75. Doesn't mean I was ever told to learn 25*3 or 3*25 at primary school.
Then there's the ones you pick up later on, which are specific to what you do day to day. I know quite a few x*1024 multiples - but I'm not for one moment suggesting we formalize this for primary school children.
Not quite sure how it happened though - well I do. They were a startup and interviews were just nice little chats to see how we got on. Managed to staff ourselves with a wonderfully random selection of people (architects with doctorates in literature and all sorts).
Maybe the reason it worked is that it assumes that some people are curious and some aren't. As long as you're curious and have access to google, you can usually make a reasonable job of most things - and ENJOY the process.
I occasionally get drafted in to ask the technical questions on interviews. I feel like a fraud as I'm bluffing a bit on some of the questions - but then when the answers come back it's amazing how somebody who clearly knows their technologies/acronyms seems to completely screw up the answer. Really simple 'real world stuff' - "You have a dev team offshore, what steps would you take to ensure implementation is successful?"
No right answers, but half the interviewees seem to hear a different question and answer "I'll review every line of code that comes back" or "I'll ensure they are all certified on X". I much prefer somebody that considers that problems may start with them - "I'll give them my design to review and we'll all talk it through before anybody opens Eclipse."
My nice company got bought by evil-megacorp and it's slowly killing me. Now have an attitude that unless you're in the relevant department, certain areas are off-limits. Everybody now sits in their little silo and doesn't seem to care about anything they're not contractually responsible for and any (however polite) suggestion at how they could improve something is taken as a personal slight against them. Oh, and asking for help and advice is tantamount to admitting you're a cretin. My personal introduction to colleagues seems to consist of trying to drill into them "If the design looks bollocks, please tell me and we can talk it through, it's entirely likely I screwed up" and "Whilst sobbing over your PC to 4am to solve a problem might look great on your timesheet, wtf didn't you just ask me?"
I seem to have drifted completely off topic now, so I'll stop..
but just considering 140 and 150 - 150 is a nicer number to me.
One is visualized as 10x14, the other as 10x15 - so yes, both rectangles.
140 I see as being composed of 2 other rectangles bolted together - 2 10x7's
150 is 3 10x5s, but also 2 10x10s, with the top square only half filled in. If there's one thing I find easier than a rectangle to visualize, it's squares.
If I'm trying to visualize it, it's always easier for me to start with the 150 and then add or subtract from it as required. 150 is a nice rectangular shape I can hold on my head without too much effort. If I was say trying to hold 141, it would be a rectangle of 140 with an annoying little extra thing I'd have to remember with it.
Aggh, not explaining this well, probably best I'm not a teacher.
I think it just boils down to the fact that I firstly try to break the question down (obviously), but break it down into things I can hold easily in my head - and this guides how I choose to break it down. It's not the operations I find hard, it's the variables.
150 fits easily as say 'one visual unit'
141 is harder as just considering that number, I'm mentally holding that not as 141, but (14*10)+1. Everytime time I need to recall that number, there's 3 f'in parts of it to juggle, so I'd like to push these 'hard' variables towards the end of my thought process, so I have to deal with them for the absolutely minimum length of time.
Thinking it through even more, I have 'emotions' towards numbers. If I was just asked which number do I prefer, I'd choose 150 over 141. 150 feels friendly, 141 is a pain in the arse and I wish to spend as little time as possible even thinking about it.
In multiple choice, I probably have a multi-step approach.
Run through it without looking at the answers using my own strange inner whiteboard/counters/whatever I can conjure up to help me. If that hits an answer I feel smug.
If I look down and don't see anything that matches, then I'll switch to something else - e.g. if all trailing digits in the question are unique, then just focus on working out what that should be. Then probably a quick check using the ^10s to just check that I've got a figure that's not an order of magnitude out.
For example on the salary question, I looked at it as a 40 hour week, followed by a 30 hours week and knowing the real answer would be a smidge less than the ballpark number I came up with.
This is pretty much what kicked off my original comment. I'd never heard of it before and was trying to decipher wtf it was going on about - then suddenly I twigged that it was the closest thing I'd seen on paper to how my head was actually working.
Hurrah for progress - I just worry that it shouldn't replace the 'traditional' method. Seem to be plenty of people who quite happily just say they multiple 47*3 as a single mental process. I'd then be really fascinated to know if the people who do this do better in an environment that teaches this way - I always felt I was almost cheating - and then when my little self-taught shortcuts left me high and dry on the next level of problem I was stumped until I developed my own way of looking at it.
Which led to my issue between GCSE and A-level when the syllabus was racing forwards faster than I could come up with my own ways of understanding.
I think I'm pretty much the same speed on either, but I'm now trying to consider why.
I *think* it's because I'm again doing my maths visually.
I prefer 150-3*3...and I suspect I'm now going to lose people, but I'll try and explain
150 is a multiple of 10. In my head I've got a grid of 10*15 - well actually it's definitely (and always is) 10 wide and I'm vaguely aware it's 15 high, but I'm not focussing on this right now.
I take off 9 from 150, so I've done 10-9, to give me one left on my top row. I know I'm still on the top row, so I still have 140 as my 'foundation', and oh theres one 'thing' left over this, so I just add the one on to give me 141.
I'm getting strangely fascinated by all the different ways people are approaching the same very simple problem.
I'm 35, so maybe it's all changed now, but first bit of rote mathematical learning was out 1..12 times tables. :)
Even then most people learnt them off by heart, and I was adding and substracting to get the answers from previously learnt tables (I think it was something like we learnt one a week in ascending order).
Not for one moment saying learning them isn't necessary - but always seemed they were missing a trick. 1..9 makes sense. When you get to 10 I think it went a bit wrong. I seem to remember this was the 'easy' week, as you just needed to add a zero. Then the 11 times was easy, as 11,22,33,44 etc all very easy - until you get to 11*10 (which you pulled back from your 10* table).. but then 11*11 it all sort of fell down and people had to learn these.
Unless, you were me - 11*11 = 11*10 + 1*11
Maybe the trick that's missed is that once you've learnt up to your 10*, 11* should be explained as 10* + 1*, 12* as 10* + 2* etc.
Again, I'm guessing that depending upon age and school, many people are probably taught this - but I wasn't and it makes me feel a bit pissy
Just feel that if we exposed children to this right from the beginning - i.e. there are multiple ways of looking at questions, then going forward everytime they saw a new problem/type of question, they'd automatically start considering what worked best for them (and lock those synapses in place for the rest of their life).
I can understand he might get some wrong and have forgotten others - but none?
My best guess is that he's pissed off with how the school board is being run, he's tried to get things changed and nobody is listening.
So he wants to go public. How does he get attention?
"Board member doesn't like tests"
"Board member didn't do as well on tests as he thought he would"
"Board member cannot do anything on test"
In his position I'd be selecting the headline, and then just filling in the test to ensure I got the one I wanted.