Thursday, January 5, 2012

An algorithm

The other day a 5-year old child was showing me her kindergarden work. I saw the instructions: "follow the pattern and color the beads", and a necklace with a sequence of pearls carefully drawn along the curving line: red, blue, purple, red blue purple, red, blue, purple, etc. I said to her: "I see that you're doing Math in school". She answered: "No, that's not Math. It's an Algorithm."

This is how I discovered the French kindergarden curriculum: drawing, singing, writing letters, alphabet, math, and algorithms.

So: "Math" means numbers and arithmetic, while "Algorithms" means logical reasoning. What a conquest!

1 comment:

  1. Jeannette Wing has been promoting "computational thinking" as a separate subject, which should be taught along side the classic subjects from pre-school and up. It sounds like the French system has already adopted that philosophy.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.