#49 For All Ages

For All Ages

Grown-ups: Help children find functions all around! A washer makes dirty clothes clean; an oven makes raw food cooked. Ponder the difference between functions as actions-on-objects and functions as correspondences. For example: an action function doubles the number of legs to make fantastic four-legged chickens; a correspondence function finds mother animals for baby animals, such as hens for chicks. This idea comes up a lot in programming.

Babies: Put several “action stations” in a row. For example, the sofa pillow makes the baby, a teddy, a doll (anything!) jump up twice. Go to the pillow, lift a toy or the baby twice to pretend-play the jump, and then go to the next station. A magic box can put a hat on toys, a blanket can invite them to sleep, a plate can feed them, and so on.

Toddlers and Young Kids: Go on scavenger hunts for compositions of functions. In the house: bathing then toweling; peeling then cutting veggies. In books or museums: eggs to caterpillars to chrysalises to butterflies.

Big Kids: Try to reverse-engineer a composition of functions! Kids give you inputs, and you give outputs of the composition, until they guess both functions. Start with simple compositions, such as doubling a number and then adding one more to it. This is much harder than guessing a single machine, and leads to more math discussions.