Odd bug with 'solve'

[parisse]

(04-28-2021 08:22 AM)jonmoore Wrote:  Nonetheless, I think it's important that kids learn symbolic math manipulation, free of computers and calculators.

Perhaps I was not clear enough. I believe that math learning process must involve a computer/calculator-free part, this should be mandatory for examples that can be solved mentally (which probably means all symbolic manipulations before the age of 15). But for computations requiring paper and pencil, this computer-free part should be limited to simple examples that help understand a math concept.

For more technical computations, the human brain is just not adapted. Of course, it is possible to train some people to be excellent at computations, and in fact there were paid jobs for that before about 1960. Some kids might even like that (kind of a sportive competition). But I don't see any valid reason to force those who don't like that, since CAS are available everywhere (on a smartphone for example). Instead we should teach kids how to verify and/or solve technical computations with a CAS, in a way that will be useful with any CAS software (that's the reason why I think we must teach commandline 1-d input), and I strongly believe that this teaching should be done in the math class and not in computer science.