Digital Fabrication and ‘Making’ in Education

A quote often attributed to Seymour Papert states that if a teacher from the 16th century would timetravel to the present, he or she would have no problem entering a school and teaching a class. Historical documents from that time show that he could not be more accurate. The Treviso Arithmetic, from 1478, teaches students how to do multiplication and division using ‘exactly’ the same paper-based algorithms we use today. Several descriptions of 16th century schools and their curricula look strikingly similar to today’s mathematics classes, such as a well-known school in Florence run by Master Francesco Ghaligai in 1519 which had a “...heavy emphasis on memorization and procedures” and a curriculum comprised of units on “multiplication, practice in the use of algorithms, division, fractions, and the rule of three” (Swetz & Smith, 1987).

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