On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 12:18 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:

I gave a talk on how they did this in the Kyoto Prize lecture followups in San Diego in 2005. Aristarchus was one of several key figures.

The shame of it is that for both math and science learning, the important heuristic of trying to identify all the possible cases for a result is never encountered by the children (or most adults) who have read about Eratosthenes.

**

Early in the Alan's talkhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-124161889929978086(~34:30, sound terrible, content good) Alan talks about a survey done at the Harvard commencement ceremonies where students, teachers and faculty were asked:

1. Why are there seasons? 2. What causes the phases of the moon?

Most got it wrong (usually along the lines of "the seasons are caused by the distance from the earth to the Sun"). Alan tried this at UCLA and got the same results (about 95% got had severe misconceptions about one or both of them). He then asked the follow up to question #1; When its Summer in the Northern hemisphere, what season is it in the Southern Hemisphere? They all got that right, then after about 20 seconds the contradiction hit them

Then he asks, why is it, that they didn't come up with this contradiction when they were asked the first question?

So what can we do about this, and how can we help kids look for all possible causes and find counter examples?

I have some ideas which I will share later, what are yours?

Stephen

*From:* Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com

*To:* naturalmath@googlegroups.com; iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org *Sent:* Wednesday, September 28, 2011 9:06 PM *Subject:* [NaturalMath] KIds from around the world measuring the Circumference of the Earth

The Goal of the Noon Day Project http://ciese.org/curriculum/noonday/ is to have students measure the circumference of the earth using a method that was first used by Eratosthenes over 2000 years ago. Students at various sites around the world will measure shadows cast by a meter stick and compare their results. From this data students will be able to calculate the circumference of the earth. Click here to get to their site and register.http://ciese.org/curriculum/noonday/

Watch the Carl Sagan video, http://youtu.be/0JHEqBLG650 its a treat.

Thanks to Ihor Charischak for pointing this out.

Stephen

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