Mathematics and Computers, Private School
Tom Smith · Oxford University Press eBooks · 1984
At the Park School the projects we do sometimes look a lot like science, and sometimes they don’t look so much like science, but just fun things to do. For example, kids in sixth grade are always writing secret things to one another. That’s a big deal, you may remember. I asked my students to study codes by finding out the frequencies of letters in the alphabet as they are used in English literature. We went to the library and each person got out a book that looked typical to him or her. And in pairs the kids began to count letters. They’d just open up the page and start in. They kept track of how many a’s, b’s, and c’s, and so on. Fine. I didn’t say how many they had to find. At the end of twenty minutes that collection of kids had counted up thousands and thousands of letters. From that data, using calculators, of course, they could figure out what fraction or percentage of the total each letter took up. E’s occurred 21 percent of the time and a’s 15 percent of the time, or whatever. They found that some letters were used much more frequently than others. Based on that, I gave them a coded message where all the a’s were transcribed into another letter, maybe n. I didn’t tell them what the mistermed letters were. I just gave them this coded message. So they counted up the letters in the coded message and found out that 21 or 22 percent of the time the letter q occurred, and so they said, “Oh I’ll bet that’s an e! Let’s put an e for q.” And that was the start. They began to filter out the letters that made sense. It was a treat for them to unlock the code. It was a simpleminded one, but it had its uses. From the teacher’s point of view it was a way to study percent, but from the child’s view it was using percent to unlock some codes.