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"Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica?"
- dylanz 18y agoExcellent discussion. They both have great points, are well read, and, experienced in the topic at hand. Theo has some great explanations. OT... my 4 year old just learned how to do simple addition AND can gut a chicken. A fine balance !
- mechanical_fish 18y agoThe first half of this is very, very good. Really good. I tuned out in the second half, somewhere in the middle of the big rant about how playing Doom has conditioned me to be a violent bloodthirsty killer. Or whatever. Maybe there was some more good argumentation down there, somewhere, but I shall never know. I was too busy imagining how the streets of South Korea must look now that an entire generation has grown up playing Starcraft. Blood runs in the gutters of Seoul! Don't make any Zerg-like moves on the subway! Sometimes, even good writers need editors.
- parenthesis 18y agoIf you skip the middle bit, do please at least read from But what do violent video games have to do with educational software? to the end, where you will find a very worthwhile discussion of what makes good vs. bad educational software.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoYour editorial efforts are appreciated. ;)
- vegai 18y agoI was very convinced by the reflections to real life soldiers' experiences. Didn't you read them? As a father of two kids, I'm considerably more worried now, especially about the education part.
- lsb 18y agoI really loved the first half. I'm working on my master's in Classics, with some Computer Science on the sly, and one of our requirements is a reading proficiency in French or German. When we're reading through paper journals in the library stacks, the thinking went, we'll need a knowledge of French or German to get through all the scholarship. I can't see myself ever reading any journal articles far away from a computer with an internet connection to Google Translate, but academic requirements aren't changing as fast at the technology scene. Fortunately, technology came to the rescue. There's a huge corpus of text segmented by domain, Wikipédia, so I just read various articles and refreshed my French.
- jfarmer 18y agoThe same is true in Mathematics. Most PhD programs and some maters' programs require proficiency in German, French, or Russian.
- eru 18y agoAnd English.
- anewaccountname 18y agoThe real goal of it is to have mathemeticians available to translate journal articles into english for the curriculum-setting elder mathemeticians =P.
- kqr2 18y agoThe mathematica home edition is now priced at $300 which makes it more affordabe: http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematicahomeedition/qa.html http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematicahomeedition/qa.ht...
- gaius 18y agoNot available outside the US and Canada tho', and Wolfram UK don't know if/when it will be.
- fgimenez 18y agoI wonder where a game like Myst, where nothing is easy to figure out, would fall under this spectrum of computer games. I remember spending hours with friends trying to solve the logic puzzles and still believe it was one of the best games I've ever played.