@leon_p_smith
‘Mindstorms’ is full of quotable text, here’s just one:

“Imagine that children were forced to spend an hour a day drawing dance steps on squared paper and had to pass tests in these ‘dance facts’ before they were allowed to dance physically. Would we not expect the world to be full of ‘dancophobes’?Would we say that those who made it to the dance floor and music had the greatest ‘aptitude for dance’? In my view, it is no more appropriate to draw conclusions about mathematical aptitude from children’s unwillingness to spend many hundreds of hours doing sums.” — Seymour Papert (p. 43)

#mathematics #ITeachMath #MathematicsEducation #MathEd #MathsEd #SeymourPapert #Mindstorms

@leon_p_smith
A puzzle from Seymour Papert's Mindstorms:

"A monkey and a rock are attached to opposite ends of a rope that is hung over a pulley. The monkey and the rock are of equal weight and balance one another. The monkey begins to climb the rope. What happens to the rock?"

What is your reasoning and what were your assumptions? If you know the answer, what was your first answer?

#puzzle #MathEd #MathsEd #iTeachMath #physics #mechanics