AIUI, what SolveIt describes is more like a reduction relation (‘leads to’) than imperative assignment. And it’s not that surprising, because you have to know about evaluating expression before you can use equality in any non-trivial way.
I don’t want to speak for SolveIt, but “result of computation” presupposes a different outcome for a counterfactually different computation input. Which is a very important difference between equality and what I call “imperative assignment.”
But I agree that kids natively perceiving [equations as a symbol game] vs [equations as causal systems] are different hypotheses, and we ought to be able to test which is correct.
It is interesting you understood imperative assignment at eight, before you understood equality. This meshes well with a hypothesis I heard.
AIUI, what SolveIt describes is more like a reduction relation (‘leads to’) than imperative assignment. And it’s not that surprising, because you have to know about evaluating expression before you can use equality in any non-trivial way.
I don’t want to speak for SolveIt, but “result of computation” presupposes a different outcome for a counterfactually different computation input. Which is a very important difference between equality and what I call “imperative assignment.”
But I agree that kids natively perceiving [equations as a symbol game] vs [equations as causal systems] are different hypotheses, and we ought to be able to test which is correct.