> On the other hand, playing with blocks, patterns, and geometrical
> arrangements is great way to develop this sort of thinking at an early
> age and certainly should be part of math-sci elementary education
> curriculum.
>
> I think the reason such tools are not used in schools with any
> systematic understanding is simple. Most teacher have never been
> exposed to this sort mathematics and so they just don't know about
> it. Even if one or two might, other teachers and the school system
> would probably discourage it, since it looks like idle play. Cutting
> and folding paper, moving funny looking blocks around, permuting
> patterns, playing with patterns as tiles, making things out of
> them. That's seen as arts and crafts---stuff to do on a rainy day.
>
> [...]
>
Maybe Parker Brothers could rerelease the Soma Cube. I loved that when
I was a kid.
My big beef about math education is that recursion isn't taught as an explicit concept until much later, if at all. I used to help teach the first-year programming course for Computer Science undergrads at Univ of Penn, and it was always sort of astonishing how much of a shock it was for these very-well-educated students to encounter recursive programming for the first time. There's really no reason not to expose kids to something like the Towers of Hanoi problem much earlier, like in elementary school. But for all the talk about getting computers into schools earlier blah blah blah (which I'm thoroughly against), nobody talks about this. Gotta get them thinking about this stuff while they're young, before their brains rot.