[thechat] Word Calculator

[Luther, Ron]

Hi Richard,

I dunno.  I think it was just a bad assignment.  It happens.  [And when
it does happen and you have kids that pride themselves on completing
their schoolwork and doing well ... it just frustrates them and reduces
them to tears ... which is just no fun at all.]  

I also think it's important for parents to help their kids with their
homework ... and when it's a "BS" assignment ... that might very well
mean writing a small program to try to make it fun.

I think a better assignment might have been to have the kids find the
words that have specific values, like 249600 or 460800.  That would let
them practice some prime factorization and then use some logic to
determine the 'possible' letters that might have gone into the word, and
then need to order those letters into a word.

An optimization problem, like the one stated, might make a nice "extra
credit" assignment ... but it doesn't strike me as particularly
appropriate as a "normal" homework problem for that grade level.
Especially since, (as a non-linear problem), they don't get an obvious
sense of "getting close" to the answer.

This is just the kind of thing that turns them off to homework in
general ... and to math in particular.


My 2¢,

RonL.
(who has helped his kids (and other folks's kids) with their homework
... and has taught briefly, so he's been on both sides of that 'homework
thang')

;-)

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Bennett [mailto:richard.bennett at skynet.be]
Subject: Re: [thechat] Word Calculator


Maybe the whole idea was to get them to excercise their multiplication,
division, and logic, not to simply type words in a box to see what came
out.
If she wrote the program however...