LabBooks

My dream job is "tutor". I enjoy seeing "the light go on" when someone grasps a difficult concept, such as differentiation. 

I've heard people say that calculus is hard because, unlike arithmetic, it's not intuitive. I've even heard people grudgingly say that algebra and trigonometry are intuitive. But not calculus.

Things are intuitive when we are exposed to them so much that they become second nature. We aren't exposed to fractions - we are exposed to parts of objects and fractions are the way we are taught to think about parts. Why are fractions intuitive and derivatives aren't? Derivatives are the way we learn to mathematically handle change and we are surrounded by change.

Why is, say, multiplication, intuitive? You probably know how to multiply two big numbers using long, or partial product, multiplication. You multiply one long number by each digit of the other long number and then you add the products together, but you have to position each of them just right before you add them. Why do you do that and why should you be confident that such a complicated procedure will work every time?

Is that intuitive?

Did you know that all the arithmetic you use is based on a handful of assumptions that nobody tries to prove. One is: a=a. Everything is equal to itself. That might be true in a single case, but how do we know that it's always true? I'm not at all equal to the me of five years ago, but then, I wasn't the same person five years ago that I am today. This instant, I am equal to myself.

Can you divide and always come up with whole number answers. There's a perfectly legitimate and useful way to do that and you might not remember it, but I can just about guarantee that you did it in elementary school! 

How do you know that 2+2=4, and why would you think that it is always the case? Can you prove it? We take an awful lot for granted.

Isaac Asimov was a great popularizer. Through most of his publication history, word processors didn't exist. Have you ever used a typewriter? Typewriters were what we used to create documents when I was in college. Word processors came out while I was in college. The typewriter word processors let you look at sentences you typed before you committed them to paper, but the computer programs were really cool. You could type an entire book, then go back and make corrections, change formats, and even add pictures (!!) before you printed it out. And then there were desktop publisher applications that made it all much easier and added a lot of options.

But the end result was still what I call "flat copy". The page just sat there while you read it. I still use word processors, for instance, I am typing this blog on a word processors app, Google Docs, on my cellphone. While you are reading it, it just sits there. I have embedded videos into some of the blogs, but they're still not anything you could call "interactive".

What I really enjoy using for educational materials is a spreadsheet application.

There's a link up there to the right that will take you to the download page of my other website. The page is called "Excursions". Most of the free downloads there are programs (like the statistics spreadsheet DANSYS) and their user guides, and LabBooks.

LabBooks are textbooks that are spreadsheet documents. Since they are spreadsheets, they're not flat copy. While you're reading them you can be doing other things, too.

LabBooks are lifelong projects for me. I might not live long enough to finish one, but I place them on my Excursions page when I update them. I just reposted the Mathematics LabBook. I waited until I had completed the first part of the first section. It's about the natural numbers (AKA the whole numbers) and the basis of arithmetic. All those questions I asked above? Read the Mathematics LabBook and you will understand the answers.

It has exercises you can do on the page and some buttons you can push to generate problems and get the answers. And you can do your own calculations in it.

I like to open up a concept and show how the insides work.

There are a few loose ends I need to tie up in the rest of the first section. For instance, I've been saying that I will show you how to memorize long numbers in mental calculations, and I will do that on the next sheet.

Talking about interactive documents, I would think the next wave of educational software might be virtual reality. A housemate is into VR. It makes me dizzy but I can imagine "Mister Wizard in a can."