There seems to be a false dichotomy being made between hands on education and the use of technology in the classroom that bothers me a bit; why should they be separated? I see no reason why a collaborative, hands on approach to education is precluded by the use of technology.
The developers of Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) have an after school program called Program by Design (http://programbydesign.org/) and one of the things they found was that some of the students started wanting to learn more math because they needed to know how to add things to their programs! The extreme view presented in this article seems to be based more upon fear of technology than any kind of understanding of it.
The developers of Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) have an after school program called Program by Design (http://programbydesign.org/) and one of the things they found was that some of the students started wanting to learn more math because they needed to know how to add things to their programs! The extreme view presented in this article seems to be based more upon fear of technology than any kind of understanding of it.