Almost every time I talk to STEAM folks, for example teachers, about METALS — that is, adding Logic (L) to STEAM — I’m asked a question that goes something like: “But we already have logic in our STEAM curriculum. Why do you need to put it in the acronym?” I have a very specific answer …
Continue reading METALS: Why Logic Deserves First Order Status in STEAM
Su Su (nee Stanford, now at the Teachers College of Columbia University) and I are spearheading an initiative to promote METALS, the explicit inclusion of logic as a part of STEM/STEAM. If you add L to STEAM and work around the letters a little, you get METALS, which is a pretty good acronym. Our first act of …
Leo came to me the other day and told me that he couldn’t put on his pants because they were “Klein pants”. Um…whaaaaa? Turns out that he had managed to get one leg inserted into the other in such a way that it really did seems like his pants were working something was a Klein …
Leo watched an extremely good TedEd about sorting algorithms, and wanted to try it out himself, so we wrote a simple bubble sort in Python, and we deployed it through the PythonCraft API to run in MineCraft. This turned out to be more fun and educational than I thought it was going to be. To …
Leo and I were studying the Fibonacci primes and we decided to build a sieve of Eratosthenes in HopScotch. (He actually wanted to write a program to find Fibonacci primes, but I figured that starting with the simpler program would be plenty of effort for this morning!) You’d think that a sieve program would be trivial, …
Recently I’ve been explicitly discussing philosophical questions with Leo. For example, this morning in the car we talked about mind body problems (If your brain was put into a clone of your body, which one is you? If parts of you were slowly replaced with a computer, all the way up to your brain being replaced …
In a recent post I described a Pokemon-like game that Leo and I invented, which I tentatively dubbed “Poke Chem”. Of course, this is so obvious an idea, that someone else must have done it. And, indeed, they have…sort of. The game Elementeo is exactly a Pokemon-like chemistry game. We bought a copy, and have played a …
A while back I reported on Leo’s first Hopscotch program, and I’ve variously discussed Hopscotch in other posts, esp. regarding Su Su and my METALS (STEAM + Logic) project. Well, it’s time that I reported on some of Leo and my Hopscotch work since I reported on his first Hopscotch program. A long time ago …
As part of our METALS (STEAM+Logic) initiative, Su created a clever Hopscotch game called The Scary Square of Opposition: You play it like our earlier games, clicking on the monsters to rotate them, and then clicking on the check to check your answer, but in this game, instead of trying to match a rule, you …
Leo actually offered an analogy between a pump and batteries — I have no recollection of what discussion context led him to that; possibly none at all — he sometimes just comes out with random observations. So, anyway, I ran with it: Then we started doing all sorts of analogical problems of this sort: This one’s …
STEM Hacks & Cogniscient 