Students should be inventors. Tinkering with existing machines leads to expertise
at building new ones. Students should develop the habit of inventing mathematics
both for utilitarian purposes and for fun. Their inventions might be rules
for a game,algorithms for doing things,explanations of how things work,or even
axioms for a mathematical structure.
Like most good inventions,good mathematical inventions give the impression of
being innovative but not arbitrary. Even rules for a game,if the game is to intrigue
anyone,must have an internal consistency and must make sense. For example,if
baseball players were required,when they arrived at second base,to stop running
and jump up and down five times before continuing to third,that would be arbitrary
because it would not “fit” with the rest of the game,and no one would stand for
it. Similarly,a Logo procedure that just produced a random squiggle on the screen
wouldn’t be a very interesting invention. The same could be said of those “math
team” problems that ask you to investigate the properties of some silly binary
operation that seems to fall out of the sky,like ,where