Throughout early grade school I hated math. It was very much like the equally-hated gym class: Doing hard things because they were hard to do. Or so I thought; there seemed to be little effort to make either of these fun or relevant.
However, for 6th grade I managed to get into a school for bright kids. Somewhere around 7th or 8th grade I was given a chance to take a new "advanced" math course. (That's my vague recollection; I don't recall being all that good in math in 6th or 7th grade so I'm hard-pressed to understand being offered the option to take an advanced math class, but somehow it happened.)
Turns out, math is more than adding and multiply large numbers and tracking a series of infuriating decimal expansions. I was introduced to all sorts of interesting things. This was where I first learned about, and played, WFF ‘N Proof[0] and Tac-tickle[1].
Math (at least this kind) became fun. It was about patterns and relations and analogies and transformations.
People claiming programming is not math seem to be playing a game of begging the question. They first define math as restricted to those things that are not directly related to programming, and then declare programming is not math. QED.
Maybe this helps people who are leery of their ability to understand programming. I'd rather see things move the other way. Show that math is much more than doing complex arithmetic to help people who are leery of their ability to understand math.
However, for 6th grade I managed to get into a school for bright kids. Somewhere around 7th or 8th grade I was given a chance to take a new "advanced" math course. (That's my vague recollection; I don't recall being all that good in math in 6th or 7th grade so I'm hard-pressed to understand being offered the option to take an advanced math class, but somehow it happened.)
Turns out, math is more than adding and multiply large numbers and tracking a series of infuriating decimal expansions. I was introduced to all sorts of interesting things. This was where I first learned about, and played, WFF ‘N Proof[0] and Tac-tickle[1].
Math (at least this kind) became fun. It was about patterns and relations and analogies and transformations.
People claiming programming is not math seem to be playing a game of begging the question. They first define math as restricted to those things that are not directly related to programming, and then declare programming is not math. QED.
Maybe this helps people who are leery of their ability to understand programming. I'd rather see things move the other way. Show that math is much more than doing complex arithmetic to help people who are leery of their ability to understand math.
0: http://www.mlagonline.com/games/wff_n_proof.php
1: http://www.gamesforthinkers.org/tac-tickle-a-challenging-gam...