[OLPC library] Math curriculum for the XO

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Susan Addington wrote:
> I am interested in math curriculum for the XO. I asked a year or so ago, 
> and got no response, but it seems that things are picking up.
> 
> I'm writing a textbook for elementary _teachers_ (hoping to publish this 
> commercially). Along the way, I learned a lot about cognition and 
> curriculum for children.
> 
> So far the math tools and lessons for the XO seem to be some isolated 
> cool activities. I'm not entirely surprised that education ministers in 
> the targeted countries were hesitant to join the project---there is no 
> curriculum that can be handed to teachers and students. I learned from 
> my experience writing isolated fun lessons in the 1990s that most 
> teachers need training and structure to learn something as new as 
> teaching with technology.
> 
> Someone asked about MATLAB for the XO. This seems to be way too 
> advanced. The XO needs a better calculator, a spreadsheet program 
> (apparently one is in the works), maybe a baby computer algebra system 
> with a very friendly front end. There is some older, but very well 
> thought-out, software called Function Probe designed by the math 
> education researcher in the 1990s. It does algebra, tables, and graphs 
> in a unified way. She told me that she was going to put it out free, in 
> java. Maybe someone could do an XO version.
> 
> Please feel free to contact me publicly or privately if you're 
> interested in developing some math curriculum.
> 
> Susan Addington
> 
> saddingt at csusb.edu <mailto:saddingt at csusb.edu>
> 
> Math Department, California State University, San Bernardino


Well ... I'll join this party. :) I haven't looked at what's already 
ported to the XO recently, but there is a fair amount of existing open 
source math education software already at the elementary school (USA) 
and middle-school (USA) levels. I'd check out FreeDuc

http://www.ofset.org/freeduc-cd
http://www.ofset.org/articles/29

I believe the major European languages are already covered, although the 
main project language on the mailing lists is French. Migrating this 
software from Debian to Fedora ought to be pretty easy. I don't know 
about Sugar interfaces, however.

I played with the calculator briefly. It's actually not all that bad, 
but XCalc is better and of course open source. A spreadsheet -- well -- 
I use them, but aside from their ubiquity, I don't really like them for 
teaching math. I've loaded the more popular open source ones on my Linux 
systems but I do nearly everything in R. Now if we're going to be 
teaching accounting, then I'd say you need one. :)

As far as new software is concerned, I'd recommend developing it in 
EToys/Squeak rather than Python. A "baby CAS" ought to be a lot easier 
in Smalltalk, being a descendant of Lisp, rather than Python, which is 
essentially an imperative scripting language.

But as far as I'm concerned, the industrial strength open source math 
software -- Axiom, Sage, R, Octave, Maxima, theorem provers, etc. -- 
should *all* be available on the school servers! Unless the servers are 
so limited in RAM, processing power and disk space that they can't be 
used for this sort of thing, there's no reason I can think of why that 
power shouldn't be available to the teachers and more advanced students.