[Blindmath] Back online

[Dániel Hajas]

Hi all,

 

Just wanted to say thanks for these e-mail conversations.Just had the
occasion to read through the mails of the last 3 weeks and I found the
topics of spacial abilities, graphing, 3D printing, multiline braille
displays, math ml etc very interesting.

Gave me couple of new ideas that can come handy either to myself or my
environment.

 

Probably I could comment on numerous things but they already are a little
outdated. However, can't resist to add a thought to the conversation about
students understanding what is actually going on during solving maths.

One thing I start to notice more and more is that regardless of sighted or
blind students especially in lower level education tend to learn only the
mathematical methods of solving problems but most people might not
understand its actual meaning. I used to have this problem, which I realise
now if I look back in time for few years. Recently I try to translate
everything into something that makes sense rather than just having two
equations or so.

 

This general issue might be even more challenging in physics. One thing I
also noticed on course mates or others involved in sciences is that once a
solution is found most students leave it in a form they obtained the result.

 

Just a quick example:

Given a task with certain parameters such as, energy consumption of Earth
population, amount of uranium isotopes available on Earth, energy produced
by a unit of uranium, etc. estimate the time taken to use all the uranium
resources.

You do the calculation and end up with let's say 284 123 654 seconds. Well,
may be you earn maximum points for your result but you definitely have no
clue how long uranium will last approximately. Is it 2 years, 100 or 4000?

 

So both in maths and other sciences we must be careful to not only teach
methods but teach students understanding and interpreting the results. If
this is done well, blind should get the idea and able to reproduce it just
as good as anyone else with visual abilities. However, if we only teach how
to use a graphical calculator to find intersections, obviously noone will
know (especially not the blind) what is going on behind the scenes and this
particular aircraft simulator will become a kamikaze simulator.

 

A more numerical example I like to keep in mind is the sinus of 0 radian.
One might get confused when seeing the result given by a computer or
sophisticated calculator. We know by definition that sin(0)=0, end of story.
But a calculator can give a value that is very-very close to zero but not
exactly. Unless you know series expansions of functions and how they work in
principle, one might ask the question am I wrong by saying 0 and I only do
that because I am lazy to remember the exact value, which is anyway very
close to 0, or the computer is wrong for some reason.

 

Best wishes,

Daniel