User talk:Mchua

A belated...

Welcome!

Welcome to the One Laptop per Child wiki. Please make yourself at home; read through the Table of Contents and FAQ, and take a look around. If you need a general wiki-tutorial, Wikieducator has some excellent ones.

Some possible pages of interest:

• Pictures
• Ask OLPC a Question
• OS images for emulation
• Rollout and community building ideas

Feel free to leave me a note on my talk page if you have further questions or need help finding your way around.

Cheers, Sj

Yellow... yellow soy milk?

Notes from conversation with taxi driver 5/6/07

Taxi driver: Math is scary

• Untrained people who don't know the math behind what they're doing can often build better things than engineers who know the mathematics can.
• People already know physics intuitively, even if they don't have formal education.
• When you start using math to describe physics, you start scaring people away because the math is so foreign (and besides they often don't need to know the math to do things, as noted above).
• You can't do "higher-level" physics without math.
• Therefore, we can't teach some folks physics because it will scare them away (maybe even scaring them away from the physics they already know).

Ian and Mel: Math is not scary

• There is a way to do math without scaring people!
• Physical intuition is very important!
• Math is just a language we use to describe the predictions and observations we make about physics.
• People tend to not be scared away by things they already know. If we can teach people stuff by putting it in the context of things they already know, we can be much less scary.
• We want to start with the intuition people already have about the physical world, so the math makes sense in context, it's motivated by something.
• You can start with very simple mathematics to describe things. For instance, F=ma can be translated "If something is more massive (probably "heavy" in common speech) you have to push it harder to get it to go faster." This is basically variable naming.
• After variable naming you can move into quantization ("more massive" becomes "35 kilograms" and "push" becomes "3 Newtons") and then addition, multiplication, etc. but the math is motivated by what you need to describe (in fact, a lot of math, such as most of vector calc, was created so that we could describe stuff happening in physics.)
• Sometimes you can't just try things with physical intuition; for instance, if you are trying to work with something very big/heavy/dangerous you can't necessarily afford to make a mistake, you need to find out through calculation how it will behave first.

Hi from Lauren

Stumbled across your Curriculum Projects page and poked around-- looks like we're working on a lot similar things. I'm in Cambridge until the end of June, and with OLPC full-time through August. Let's talk! Lauren 12:30, 25 May 2007 (EDT)

I wonder if there would be interest in periodic "olpc content" get-togethers in Cambridge? Either user-group model or periodic dinner model. MitchellNCharity 14:10, 12 June 2007 (EDT)