How Programmable Calculators and a Sci-Fi Story Brought Soviet Teens Into the Digital

[EdS2]

Vincent Wrote:An interesting article...

Indeed! I posted about it over here and what came up for me was the training of 100k teachers - both in the USSR and independently in France.

Thomas Okken Wrote:Unlikely? It doesn't sound surprising to me, I thought the Soviets were generally very big on education.

This was my reaction too.

Thomas Okken Wrote:Intersting article, though, and now I am curious about that calculator. Is there any information about the B3-34 on the Internet that isn't in Russian?

Wikipedia says:

Quote:B3-34 used reverse Polish notation and had 98 bytes of instruction memory, four stack user registers and 14 addressable registers. Each register could store up to 8 mantissa or Significand digits and two exponent digits

Russian Wikipedia adds: "speed of about 5 simple operations per second" and "there is a previous result register".

Garth pulls out Fredkin's quote:

Quote:We now understand that computer literacy is not knowing how to program. It is not understanding how [a] computer works. It is not knowing about bits and bytes and flip-flops and gates.... We now know that true computer literacy means having the skills to use the advanced application programs, such as word processing and spreadsheet systems.

"We now know..." Hmm. At least in the UK we knew that once but we now know something different. We call the subject "computational thinking": it's useful for people to know something of how computers, as tools, are used. And in that sense, useful to know how software behaves, and what it's made of. It's not primarily about learning to program but neither is it primarily about using word processors and spreadsheets.