Re: Programming languages for the very young

From: Samuel Walters (swalters_usenet_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 01/18/04 

Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2004 12:33:36 GMT

| Anton van Straaten said |
> Similarly, the person behind the McDonald's counter doesn't need to know
> much about math. All he needs to know is how to translate the cash given by
> the customer into numbers to enter into the register, and the inverse of
> that operation in order to pay out the change. (Perhaps a display with
> pictures of the bills and coins could help here, or just a fully-automated
> register.) General-purpose addition and subtraction is useless to these
> people, and we should stop bothering to require that students achieve "Math
> Literacy".

Worse yet...

When I worked at McDonalds in 1995, the cash registers allowed the user to
either punch in the numerical amount of the cash tendered or they may
press buttons denoting the bills and coins they have in hand. Moreover,
the change to be returned was displayed as both the numerical amount, and
the number of each particular bill and coins to be given back. There is
some good reasoning behind this, even in the case of an intelligent
employee. Every now and again, my brain felt like it would "deadlock" on
a simple change-making operation and I could just glance at the display to
set myself straight.

When I recently worked at 7-11, we had problems with con artists trying to
prey on the less intelligent or mindful of our staff by making strange and
complicated requests for change.

I used to completely baffle people there by being able to make change in
my head, and also being able to count back change both ways. Part of the
problem is that workers in these low-end jobs are treated as commodities,
and not investments. We were never without a stack of applications ready
to fill the shoes of anyone who quit or got fired.

Sam Walters. 

-- 
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