...something that the teacher wasn't even teaching, and that I wouldn't be taught for near 5 years. In second grade, I was able to teach myself algebra by analyzing problems and their solutions as posed by an educational game that we were encouraged to play (for its arithmatic game, but that was too easy). If someone had then taught me the order of operations and negative numbers, I would have had a much better start in my math education. Sadly, this did not happen, they taught multiplication tables instead, ugh.
The point of this is that if a child likes doing something, and there is opportunity to use this to teach them something, this should be employed to do so. I was eager to zap those math problems as they went across the screen, and the algebra was offered as a higher difficulty level, so I tried it. These tools can be used to introduce topics before they are taught, to provide exposure to a problem before the proper analysis is taught, and can be continually used to hone the skills involved in learning the analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
...something that the teacher wasn't even teaching, and that I wouldn't be taught for near 5 years. In second grade, I was able to teach myself algebra by analyzing problems and their solutions as posed by an educational game that we were encouraged to play (for its arithmatic game, but that was too easy). If someone had then taught me the order of operations and negative numbers, I would have had a much better start in my math education. Sadly, this did not happen, they taught multiplication tables instead, ugh. The point of this is that if a child likes doing something, and there is opportunity to use this to teach them something, this should be employed to do so. I was eager to zap those math problems as they went across the screen, and the algebra was offered as a higher difficulty level, so I tried it. These tools can be used to introduce topics before they are taught, to provide exposure to a problem before the proper analysis is taught, and can be continually used to hone the skills involved in learning the analysis.