This program started my career in digital learning. I bought my first computer, an Apple II in February 1978 on their first anniversary. I talked my wife into letting me play with a computer for doing my checkbook and turning our houselights on and off. Though I was an educator who had worked with film technology, I never imagined that this machine would send my life rocketing in a new direction. That force hit the following summer at one of New England Apple Tree monthly club meetings where we came to see the wonderful new things people were dreaming up and take them home on cassette tapes. The buzz this meeting was about the latest West Coast phenomenon. Written by a guy we never heard of, Bruce Tognazzini, it was the first program to integrate text, animation (in Apple Lores graphics), and sound to tell an interactive story. It made use of the joysticks that came with the Apple II, and the first to tell a story. I fell in love. It made me see the personal computer as a tool I could use to express my vision of curriculum, and led me to start the first of my companies to express this vision.

I met Tog a few months later and we became good friends. He was by then working at Apple as an interface designer having a major impact on Apple and Mac screen designs. He continues to help companies improve user design today. Though Tog was not an educator, indeed, when he wrote the program he was the owner of a San Francisco Sony television store who bought his first Apple II about when I did as a toy to play with on his Sony Trinitron. The Probability Machine was the first program he wrote. Did this program turn him into a brilliant designer or was he already a great designer looking for a medium? I don’t know. But he was among the first to understand how to make screens both interactive, engaging, and wonderfully simple at the same time. For example, he introduced the graphic element through a story about the building of a great machine, a massive public works project in the late 19^th century, to build the understanding of probability. He tells us that the small rectangle on the bottom right of the machine is a door to let people access the machine. He took a common concept seen in many museums and made it a powerful tool that could go into the hands of students. I saw his vision as education’s vision.

As I designed educational software over the years since the Probability Machine appeared, I have often thought of Tog and his amazing 1500 lines of Woz’s Integer BASIC code, saved on and loaded from cassette tapes, and edited without a printer or any of the tools coders rely on today. I think of it now as I play with our spreadsheet version of Pascal’s Triangle that enables students to tell new stories and perhaps, just perhaps, be directed by this Spreadsheet Lab in a new life direction. There is great power in this tool when we let students use it to experiment and explore. Thank you Tog.

Art

My fortune cookie today read, “If you’re happy, you’re successful.” Usually for me that is true, but not today. For during that same lunch my iPhone told me that Lynn Steen had died. I never had the good fortune to meet him in person or to even talk with him, but I loved him and learned so much from him. His words, “Mathematics is the Science of Patterns,” from an article he wrote in Science in 1987 and his other visionary works on math education have been my guiding lights. I have long wanted to write something about math education that was beautiful and compelling enough to make it worthwhile for him to read. But alas, I have waited too long. I will nonetheless not give up trying.

Lynn Steen sought a revolution in math education that would enable every child to participate in our more and more mathematical world, to see the wonder and beauty of its patterns, and to fall in love with his discipline. Today, as I remember him, I dedicate myself once again and ever more deeply to this great task he has left for us to complete.

Art

To make its workers more productive, the Western Electric Company, makers of phones and other parts for the Bell Telephone System, conducted one of the great scientific experiments of all time. The researchers increased the brightness of the lighting at a plant in Hawthorne, Illinois just outside of Chicago, incrementally, while measuring worker output. They alerted the workers to the experiment and they found that as the workplace got brighter the output increased. Then, in a great out-of-the-box experiment, they dimmed the lights incrementally, telling the workers the experiment was still going on. Output continue to grow!

This became known as the Hawthorne Effect.

…the novelty of being research subjects and the increased attention from such could lead to temporary increases in workers’ productivity. Wikipedia “Hawthorne effect”

I got to thinking about the Hawthorne Effect while rereading the Common Core State Standards and thinking about the testing controversy that embroils us. In their website under the Key Shifts in Mathematics menu, they shine a bright light on what they consider to be the core topics:

• In grades K–2: Concepts, skills, and problem solving related to addition and subtraction
• In grades 3–5: Concepts, skills, and problem solving related to multiplication and division of whole numbers and fractions
• In grade 6: Ratios and proportional relationships, and early algebraic expressions and equations
• In grade 7: Ratios and proportional relationships, and arithmetic of rational numbers
• In grade 8: Linear algebra and linear functions

And they conclude:

“This focus will help students gain strong foundations, including a solid understanding of concepts, a high degree of procedural skill and fluency, and the ability to apply the math they know to solve problems inside and outside the classroom.”

The Hawthorne Effect caused by these brighter illuminations will no doubt improve student productivity as measured by test results. But as with the Hawthorne plant, once the experiment, and it is an experiment, is over, once the lighting no matter what the brightness level, stays constant, then productivity will return to its “normal” level. For we have not really changed either the product to make it much more integrated nor have we changed the process to make it more productive.

For the past 50 years we have put math education through a series of Hawthorne Effects. This is the reason that the NAEP scores have remained flat lined. If we truly want to substantially improve math education, as we must, then we will have to reinvent both its product and its process and not just shine brighter lights on it.

I just looked at a wonderful short video by Sir Ken Robinson on creativity at https://youtu.be/63NTB7oObtw in which he describes creativity as a process that produces something original that has value.

At What if Math we seek to make learning a creative experience, a process that enables every student to produce something original that has value. Isn’t that the essence of what learning is or at least should be. Can all learning be a creative experience? Can it be problem-based with interesting problems that can appeal to a wide variety of students? Can it provide powerful tools for students to experiment with and to stretch their imaginations enabling them to produce something original and of value? We believe most, if not all, of it can!

The spreadsheet math problems and experiments in What if Math are designed to enable every student to be creative and to experience creative learning. We hope you will encourage your students to learn and use the wonderful power of spreadsheets to be a creative problem solver. And we hope you will help us create new Labs by sending us problems to develop or Labs you would like us to publish. I look forward to hearing from you.

Art