the new math: old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3564

snip

I mentioned gear only because I thought earlier in the thread you were saying that one of the appeals of math was that you could get this sense of accomplishment without potentially-expensive gear.

I think we might be operating with different ideas about "CS clbuttes not involving programming". There are almost certainly some that don't present clear methods for analytical thinking. I don't want to try to give examples since I don't teach (and didn't take) many of those myself, but maybe things called "software engineering" (which seem to often be about how to organize and manage big projects -- useful but a little fuzzy?).

One example of the kind of clbutt I had in mind is the one I call "math for CS majors" and curriculum descriptions usually call something like "Discrete Math". Some of the things often taught in this course don't provide the kind of immediate feedback provided by programming. The examples that come to mind are formal logic (including very structured proofs, reminiscent of the ones many of us did in high-school geometry clbuttes) and proof techniques (particularly proof by induction). These seem to me to provide nice clear methods of analytic thinking, but .... Maybe you mean something different by "analytic thinking"?

Agreed!

Next time you have a conversation like this, you can cite the existence of another such rarity. (That "math for CS majors" course? IMO, one wonderfully fun topic after another. If only more of the students agreed.)

So the odds might not be good that you can explain what you meant by "problem with an equals sign" above -- but I didn't get that, and it sounds interesting. Can you clarify?

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.