A simple approach

[@STEAMerBear]

I knew this immediately. Some days I’m lost. Speaking of one of those days, today I ran across a math doctoral student who was happy that AI can almost win a math competition. I wonder if she’s too unimaginative to grasp all the implications of that.

[@STEAMerBear]

@@MathandEngineering I did not know how to compute a root until I was studying engineering. I would use a calculator or a log table.

[@MathandEngineering]

You know using calculators and These stuffs, makes math boring. Math is more interesting when you are solving it using knowledge rather than using a calculator. I don't mean using a calculator is bad, but I noticed that if you solve if yourself, it makes you more interested in learning more things and even curious about everything in the world, and that will make you acquire alot of knowledge. Just like Sir Isaac Newton who discovered gravity, because he was curious about why the Apple fell. That is the same for math lovers I noticed we all are curious as to why is this so. When something happen you don't ask yourself, but your heart does. This really helped me alot. Being curious made me know many things that I wouldn't have known if I wasn't curious

[@STEAMerBear]

@@MathandEngineering very true! I recognized this fairly early on in my own life, but teachers were annoyed to be drawn off topic. As a teacher I oppose the use of calculators until the necessary computation is well understood and ideally some skill has been developed. (Sadly this seems impossible computing trig values.) For example, when my students saw that sqrt(0.25)=0.5, I asked them if that seems right. They couldn’t say yes or no because they had no sense of the function. I next showed then the square roots of 25, 16 and 4. ONLY THEN did they (wrongly) conclude square roots are smaller. After understanding the root of 1 is 1, they understood it’s not so simple. Then the graph y=sqrt(x) made sense to them and they learned a great deal that day. Calculators undermine learning if they are not used judiciously.

[@MathandEngineering]

Yes the graph is really going to make sense and convincing to every one. You know when I am dealing with numbers behind the point, I like writing them in standard form, for example to calculate the square root of 0.25 I'll just write it as 25 × 10^-2 It's square root will be √(25 × 10^-2) = 5×10^-1 = 5×0.1 = 0.5