Teaching your baby math…

How many dots are in that picture above?

Quick.

That’s the way the Domans propose teaching your baby math.  Previously I mentioned that I was told to read a book before I could disagree with the book.  The book caught me off guard by starting off with “Rarely do people buy books to disagree with them…”

Well, my wife bought the book.  Thank you very much.

But anyway, it has been kind of an interesting read. They’ve got some institute where they started by helping mentally disabled children. And they found that they could get kids with literally half a brain (other half was cut out because it was causing seizures) to perform as well as other “normal” kids in plenty of tasks. Some of them math related.

Which then lead them to the question of – why isn’t the “normal” kid doing better?  How come half brained kids can catch up to them?  I can appreciate the humor in that.

So they created exercises for kids based on the fact that kids are learning machines. Wired to learn from the get go. But they are best at learning facts at a young age. Relationships. Not really abstract concepts.

So instead of teaching them the alphabet and the way letters form into words. Teach them words. Let them relate “dog” with the dog…”cat” with the cat.  And so forth. They’ll learn that these patterns map to objects in the world. Without being weighed down by having to learn the letters that make up the words.

[One day I’ll digress on the way that Hofstadter spent a lot of his time while I was in Indiana on the “letter spirit” project, which was trying to find out the essence of the letter “A”. Or any letter. But how come humans can tell a letter “A” when written millions of different ways by different people…and computers cannot. Post office would like computers to be able to. But they are not foolproof. Anyway, kids get pretty good at it pretty fast. But that’s a point for a different day.]

So the same carries over to numbers. Teach quantities. Don’t teach symbols and numerals. Those can come later. This plan fits into my original plan, which was to teach Salvador number theory and bases right away…instead of waiting until highschool.  So me and the Domans were on the same page…

They figure, show flashcards, but have the flashcards show quantity. Not numbers. Right on. And they keep it simple, with the elements being the same. Don’t show 5 chickens and 6 dogs and 7 maids a milking. Just show dots. And say the word “five” or “six” or “seven” while you show the flashcard. And before you know it, they’ll have the concept down.

Bingo. Let’s do it. How many cards should we make?  I thought maybe 25. Maybe 35.

Domans want to goto 100. That’s 5050 dots by their count (they used sticky dots on posterboard and give you a list of things to buy…)  They expect your little Rainman to be able to differentiate between 92 and 95 dots.  And enjoy it.  Hmm…not so sure I’m with them.

But – to be fair – I haven’t finished the book yet. But I haven’t read anything yet that is making me think I’m going to agree with them.  They do have lots of other good points, which I like, but this whole going up to 100 thing seems silly to me.

So instead, I spent some time playing in Flash to create some flashcards for Salvador. His kind mother used powerpoint to print some real ones out, but they are awkward to handle and hard to get him to focus on. He is pretty interested in the computer, watching stories on them and seeing bubbles pop.  So I think squeezing in a few moments a day on some computer flashcards should be easy enough.

So here’s my first stab at the application. I still have lots more logic to put into the app to simulate their training routine, but I think this is good enough for basic drilling. Click or hit any key to advance to the next card.  How long does it take you to figure out how many dots are on the screen?

There are 27 in the picture above…in case you were still wondering.