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by James Robertson.
Original Post: An interesting human factors question
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If you live in Washington state, and have a child doing math in the public schools, you probably know that math education has gotten a bit weird in this state.
Last night, I sat down and wrote a little "flash cards" program for my daughter to practice simple addition/subtraction on. My thought is that there is a certain atomic set of simple addition/subtraction operations that are best memorized, when memorized giving way to allow the brain to be used for higher level thinking. So I spent about 1.3 hours writing this little app. Thank heavens I have Smalltalk (even if it was just VW 7 NC) and can do this kind of thing so easily.
An interesting question came up though as I did. It presents a UI which is mostly dominated with something like:
13
+ 8
-----
As she does the math, she hits the number keys and the number shows up below the line. The question that I ran into was: what order do you input the number in? The answer to the above problem is 21. When we enter that number, we do it from most significant digit to least. We type 2 and then type 1. But when you're doing any math that involves carrying, we work from least to most significant digits. IOW, if you were working the above at on paper, you'd write the 1 first, followed by the 2.
So, what's the better way to have the interface work?
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