Math & Art

© Phillips Academy

Here's a great example of PA students using the Addison Gallery to explore patterns and math through art: reconstructing Sol Lewitt's Wall Drawing #716.  We're going to be doing activities like this...although probably not this exact one...this summer during Seeing in Patterns, Thinking in Code.

Swing-O-Matic

FiveThirtyEight has a fantastic interactive data visualization they are calling the Swing-O-Matic. It lets you fiddle with voter turnout and party preferences of various demographic groups to see what the impact would be on the upcoming presidential election.  It calculates both popular vote and electoral college.

See if you can tweak is so that the electoral winner and the popular winner are not the same!

The Importance of Understanding Algorithms

Is Facebook politically biased?

This question is in the news as a result of Gizmodo's accusation that Facebook intentionally distorts the "trending" list away from conservative viewpoints.

The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo has a must-read column, Facebook's Bias is Built-in, and Bears Watching, about the power of algorithms, not just to do complicated mathematics, but to sway human opinion and even elections:

“Algorithms equal editors,” said Robyn Caplan, a research analyst at Data & Society, a research group that studies digital communications systems. “With Facebook, humans are never not involved. Humans are in every step of the process — in terms of what we’re clicking on, who’s shifting the algorithms behind the scenes, what kind of user testing is being done, and the initial training data provided by humans.”

Understanding what algorithms are, and how computers sift and sort and shape data, is as important to citizenship in the digital era as is literacy.

Do Toys Help Prepare Kids for Coding?

The Wall Street Journal is running an article, How Wooden Toys Teach Kids to Code, that posits that some forms of manipulative play (meaning they manipulate physical objects, not their parents) help kids prepare for coding.

It's a topic I'm interested in because teaching middle school and high school level coding it's clear that many kids could benefit from earlier exposure to some of the concepts.  Imagine if we taught no math, not even counting, until high school.  Just think of how overwhelming their first math class would be in the 9th grade. Some kids would intuitively grasp some of the concepts, but others...who might have been strong math students had they built up to it more slowly...would feel lost and discouraged.

That's pretty much what happens when we don't teach any programming or computational thinking until they are teenagers.  That doesn't mean they have to be writing recursive functions at 6 years old, but neither do we have them dividing fractions or factoring quadratics in elementary school. Instead we get them used to thinking in numbers and the four basic operations so that when they start doing "math" they're facile in the fundamental concepts and language.

We need a K-12 computational thinking curriculum that takes the same deliberate...and patient...approach to coding.

Getting back to the WSJ article, I'm curious if the article's suppositions are correct, that playing with these sorts of toys help prepare kids for coding.  For my part I'm an owner of Robot Turtles, and I've also pre-ordered (my bad, I mean "backed") the Kickstarter project Cubetto.  I'd like to believe the underlying assumption is true, but I'd also like to see some intentional research.

Public Speaking

I just heard on NPR an interview with Chris Anderson from TED (of TED Talks fame) promoting his new book on public speaking.  He posited that the culture of short videos that has arisen on the Internet in recent years has reinvigorated both interest and need for public speaking skills.

(NPR hasn't posted a link yet; I'll update when they do.)

Visualizing Disparity

The New York Times has some amazing visualizations of how income and race effect success in public schools.  Move your mouse over the data points to see what I believe is every school district in the country (are there even enough pixels to do that?)

Later this month in my Computer Science 450 course we are going to explore the technology used to make these visualizations.