I just tried out DragonBox, and it is quite fun. It’s a pretty poor instructional aid, though. Sure, it teaches you how to balance equations by following the correct rules, but it doesn’t explain where the rules come from. Algebra is more than rote memorization; a student who truly understood algebra would be able to re-create all the rules, such as “if you add something to the left side, add it to the right side as well”, completely from scratch. DragonBox does not teach this level of understanding.
Just because something doesn’t teach everything about a subject doesn’t make it a poor instructional aid. Algebra is more than rote memorization, but having the rules memorized does help a lot in getting to the stage where you truly understand it. Even if you do understand it and could in principle recreate the rules from scratch, recalling them from memory is faster than deriving them each time you need them—and since algebra is pretty much the foundation of all advanced math, you’ll be needing them a lot if you want to study math at all. (Though if you end up struggling with the harder topics because you didn’t have the rules of algebra appropriately memorized, you might never want to study more of it...)
Algebra is more than rote memorization, but having the rules memorized does help a lot in getting to the stage where you truly understand it.
I disagree. I think that memorizing the rules first, without understanding where they come from, discourages the student from attempting to understand anything to begin with. After all, his goal is to balance an equation, and look, he just balanced it… so what else is there to know ? Thus, the memorization approach creates the impression that math (or whatever subject you’re studying) is all about arbitrary rules that make no sense; it’s all about “guessing the teacher’s password”, and that’s boring.
Contrast this with the approach of treating an equation like a puzzle. If “2x − 3 = 5”, and we want to know what x is, there are many ways to approach the solution. We could ask, “someone did a bunch of stuff to x to get 5, how can we undo it ?”, or we could say, “the equation is like a pair of scales that are balanced, so what can we do to get x by itself without unbalancing the scales ?”, etc. Some possible partial answers are, “someone took away 3, so let’s add it back”, or “if we add 3 to both sides, the scales will still be balanced but we’ll be one step closer to a solution”. But “add 3 to both sides because that’s how the game is programmed and you won’t get the high score otherwise” isn’t much of an answer. High scores don’t mean anything, algebra does.
Well, I can’t speak for others, but my personal experience with math tends to be that I only start properly learning why something works once I have the rules pretty well memorized. Before that, my working memory is so occupied with trying to just remember how to apply the rules that I don’t have the space to remember why they work. Or alternatively, I can learn why the rules work—but in that case I don’t have the memory capacity left for remembering how to apply them.
Of course, this is complicated by the fact that during the process of trying to memorize the rules, I often stop to think about why they work in an attempt to rederive them and make sure I’m not misremembering them. So it’s not pure rote memorization, like the way it seems to be with DragonBox. But I would still expect that if somebody first learned them as meaningless rules in the game, and was then later taught math and the reasons for the rules, they’d have a good chance of being delighted at discovering where the rules came from, and could spend all of their cognitive capacity on developing an actual understanding.
Fair enough; it’s possible that you and I simply think in different ways. I personally find it very difficult to memorize (seemingly) arbitrary rules, and I found it very difficult to un-teach the “guess the teacher’s password” mentality to people. But it’s quite likely that I’m making an unjustified generalization from a very small number of examples.
I wonder if there’s any layman-accessible literature on this topic...
I just tried out DragonBox, and it is quite fun. It’s a pretty poor instructional aid, though. Sure, it teaches you how to balance equations by following the correct rules, but it doesn’t explain where the rules come from. Algebra is more than rote memorization; a student who truly understood algebra would be able to re-create all the rules, such as “if you add something to the left side, add it to the right side as well”, completely from scratch. DragonBox does not teach this level of understanding.
Just because something doesn’t teach everything about a subject doesn’t make it a poor instructional aid. Algebra is more than rote memorization, but having the rules memorized does help a lot in getting to the stage where you truly understand it. Even if you do understand it and could in principle recreate the rules from scratch, recalling them from memory is faster than deriving them each time you need them—and since algebra is pretty much the foundation of all advanced math, you’ll be needing them a lot if you want to study math at all. (Though if you end up struggling with the harder topics because you didn’t have the rules of algebra appropriately memorized, you might never want to study more of it...)
I disagree. I think that memorizing the rules first, without understanding where they come from, discourages the student from attempting to understand anything to begin with. After all, his goal is to balance an equation, and look, he just balanced it… so what else is there to know ? Thus, the memorization approach creates the impression that math (or whatever subject you’re studying) is all about arbitrary rules that make no sense; it’s all about “guessing the teacher’s password”, and that’s boring.
Contrast this with the approach of treating an equation like a puzzle. If “2x − 3 = 5”, and we want to know what x is, there are many ways to approach the solution. We could ask, “someone did a bunch of stuff to x to get 5, how can we undo it ?”, or we could say, “the equation is like a pair of scales that are balanced, so what can we do to get x by itself without unbalancing the scales ?”, etc. Some possible partial answers are, “someone took away 3, so let’s add it back”, or “if we add 3 to both sides, the scales will still be balanced but we’ll be one step closer to a solution”. But “add 3 to both sides because that’s how the game is programmed and you won’t get the high score otherwise” isn’t much of an answer. High scores don’t mean anything, algebra does.
Well, I can’t speak for others, but my personal experience with math tends to be that I only start properly learning why something works once I have the rules pretty well memorized. Before that, my working memory is so occupied with trying to just remember how to apply the rules that I don’t have the space to remember why they work. Or alternatively, I can learn why the rules work—but in that case I don’t have the memory capacity left for remembering how to apply them.
Of course, this is complicated by the fact that during the process of trying to memorize the rules, I often stop to think about why they work in an attempt to rederive them and make sure I’m not misremembering them. So it’s not pure rote memorization, like the way it seems to be with DragonBox. But I would still expect that if somebody first learned them as meaningless rules in the game, and was then later taught math and the reasons for the rules, they’d have a good chance of being delighted at discovering where the rules came from, and could spend all of their cognitive capacity on developing an actual understanding.
Fair enough; it’s possible that you and I simply think in different ways. I personally find it very difficult to memorize (seemingly) arbitrary rules, and I found it very difficult to un-teach the “guess the teacher’s password” mentality to people. But it’s quite likely that I’m making an unjustified generalization from a very small number of examples.
I wonder if there’s any layman-accessible literature on this topic...