What do controversial AI chatbots, the manual for your latest “big kid toy” and your child’s maths homework all have in common? The answer is the humble algorithm. The word is becoming fairly commonplace today but most people have a very sketchy idea of what it actually means.
In fact, if you’re over thirty, I’m guessing that when you were a kid you’d never even heard the word. Unless you were a computer nerd! You may be surprised to learn, then, that the word actually originated in the 9th century in the middle east. It’s derived from the name of a guy who wrote one of earliest and most famous algebra textbooks (Abu Ja’far Mohammed Ben Musa al-Khowārazmī).
If you’re thinking that an algorithm is some sinister robot-app-like-thingy that’s spying on your every word to find cause to boot you off your fave social media platform, you’re dead wrong. Yes, algorithms can be used to perform such tasks but that’s not the purpose of a generic algorithm any more than a random knife’s purpose is to cause bodily harm.
An algorithm is simply an ordered set of steps. So, something as innocent and every day as a recipe for your favourite dessert can rightly be called an algorithm. And so, too, can the evacuation procedures written on the back of the hotel room door that you’ve probably never read. And if you have a detailed “how-to” chore checklist for your kids, even that qualifies as an algorithm!
Now for an even bigger surprise than the origin of the word: the teaching of algorithms in maths is highly controversial. I know, right? That is almost oxymoronic! Logically, you would think that a subject based on logic and order should be all for algorithms. And in a sense you’d be right. But it seems the boffins that design maths curriculums for school don’t think so.
When I did teacher training in the mid 2000s I clearly remember a primary mathematics lecturer smugly proclaiming, “Teaching kids algorithms is a waste of time in the age of computers.”
Hmmm….
At the time I’d been lecturing in IT at uni for nearly 10 years and one of my biggest bugbears was how totally clueless the students were at coming up with algorithms. It’s like the logic module had been removed from their brains! That lecturer’s boast was the beginning of me realising where those logic modules went.
You see, kids, especially young kids, learn by doing. Logical thinking is really just about breaking down a problem into a series of sequential steps. So if you show a kid that a simple and logical series of steps can be used to solve a problem of a particular type and then give them plenty of practice doing it and then you show them a different but equally simple and logical series of steps to solve a different type of problem and keep repeating the process, they will eventually develop the ability to break up problems for themselves.
One of the biggest problems resulting from the teacher training that I (and countless others) were subjected to is that children are taught more “about” maths than they are taught to “do” maths. The tragic consequences of this situation keeps my tutoring practice overflowing with clients.
And the beautiful irony of the current situation is that, while teaching (traditional) algorithms for the basic operations is taboo, the National Curriculum urges teachers to teach the children to come up with algorithms for such things as generating repeating sequences of numbers (like 1, 3, 5… or 2, 4, 8, 16…). From observation and experience, I can tell you that teaching the latter is much easier if you’ve actually “spoon fed” the younger child the more traditional (and now taboo) algorithms before you try and have them deduce algorithms for themselves.
Over the coming weeks and months, we will explore various algorithms for teaching all of the core processes that a well-educated primary school child should be able to perform. And here’s a spoiler alert: I don’t always advocate ONE. SINGLE. “RIGHT” method! There are horses for courses and courses for horses.
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