Aspies For Freedom

I admit I've been accused (by PM) of being posting too often on mathematical topics, but this "you-couldn't-make-it-up" news story was so hilarious I just had to share it with you all.

'Cool Cash' card confusion
Ciara Leeming
3/11/2007


A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it.

The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it.

"I think Camelot are giving people the wrong impression - the card doesn't say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled."

A Camelot spokeswoman said the game was withdrawn after reports that some players had not understood the concept.

She said: "The instructions for playing the Cool Cash scratchcard are clear - and are printed on each individual card and in the game procedures available at each retailer. However, because of the potential for player confusion we have decided to withdraw the game."

More than 15m adults in Britain have poor numeracy - the equivalent of a G or below at GCSE maths

Almost three times as many UK adults (15.1m) have poor numeracy - the equivalent of a G or below at GCSE maths - than with poor literacy skills, according to the government's Skills for Life survey.

Peter Hall, of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics, said: "The concept of minus numbers is something we would cover with 11 or 12 year olds, and we would expect them to have come across it before.

"The concept of smaller numbers is something that some people do seem to struggle with. Seven is clearly smaller than eight, so they focus on that and don't really see the minus sign. There is also a subtle difference in language between smaller - or lower - and colder. The number zero feels lower.

"There have always been some people who find numbers and basic mathematics difficult. Maybe in the past it was less noticeable because people could find jobs they could excel in without having qualifications in maths."

Manchester Evening News
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/n..._confusion

That is really funny!

I taught negative numbers to my kids just after positive numbers - and long before they started school. It is small wonder that so many UK adults are clueless if they aren't taught until they are eleven or twelve!

It is basic arithmetic, for goodness' sake!

1. Positive integers:
First you learn to count upwards and you learn to add.
2. Negative Integers:
Then you learn to count backwards and to 'take away'! Where is the problem?
3. Then you learn about other ways of handling numbers: Multiplication (includes learning the 'Times Tables') and division, which leads to non-integers and how they can be expressed as fractions or decimals.

Surely all these topics should have been covered by the age of eight at the latest?!

What on earth are teachers doing?

Negative numbers aren't that basic. I didn't cover them in school maths until Year 7, same as the adults in the article (and I went on to study maths at university). The subject didn't come as too much of a shock, because I'd come across negative numbers in puzzle books and even stories like Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. When we did negative numbers in school maths we learned the rules for multiplying them (positive x negative = negative, negative x negative = positive) at the same time, so we couldn't have done that prior to learning about multiplication.

Initially it surprised me that people should have difficulty with negative temperatures, because it's pretty obvious on a mercury thermometer that 1 is above 0 which is above -1. Presumably those  ladies in Leverhulme had never looked at a thermometer.

Is anyone else as bugged as me when TV weather presenters say "it's going to be twice as cold today as yesterday"? What on earth does that mean?

As well as thermometers, there are negative numbers around in the simplest arithmetic - 'sums'.

Sums are the result of combining integers.

Addition: A positive integer and a positive integer. 3 + 2 = 5

Subtraction: A positive integer and a negative integer. 3 - 2 = 1

That is how I taught all my children arithmetic. Where is the problem? I used a simple home-made board with two hundred horizontal bars. The middle (no bar) was Zero.

To play, we threw two dice; a red die for positive, a blue die for negative. To calculate one simply moved a playing piece 'up' the board for the amount of a positive integer, and 'down' for a negative one. Playing pieces were a counter or a coin or a toy car.

Sometimes the answer was below the zero  - a negative number. I explained that this equated to things in real life like temperatures below freezing, overspending from your bank account (overdraft), going the wrong way on a motorway (getting further from your destination).

In my experience, four-year-olds have absolutely no problem with that, even if, like my youngest, they have dyscalculia.

Yes, I too have a problem with TV weather presenters saying "it's going to be twice as cold today as yesterday". It is completely meaningless, and probably further confuses those who haven't grasped the concept of temperature! After all, if it were freezing yesterday, and it is twice as hot today, it is 273.16C... (actually it only feels like that, it is 'only' 30C)

Yes, but your reply was much neater and easier to understand!

Ah, negative numbers... As someone who being introduced to the concept of negative integers at the age of 5 I find the story even more funny. But at school we had them only in the 6th grade - that is, when average pupils are about the age of 12. We had "what would you do you if you were God" thread - now I god a partial answer - if I were God, I'd completely change the maths curriculum for primary and secondary school

who was introduced*

Making the darned kids write "k" over and over again. I mentioned, in passing, that Gemma loves math to her teacher and all I got was a blank stare!

I remember learning negative numbers in kindergarten, maybe first grade (age 6 or 7).  We had a number line glued to the top of our desks, like a ruler... with 0 in the middle and one on either side...  what's so hard about that?

BTW- the line about "they didn't ask if it was cooler or warmer, just lower and higher" was priceless. I thought the US had all the dumbies.

You ask what are teachers foing?

Don't know how in UK, but in Ukraine, where I studied primary/secondary school, the math curriculum was:
1st grade: Addition+subtraction in positive integers, properties of addition and sutraction
2nd grade: multiplication, time tables, modulo division;
3rd grade: common fractions, linear equations
5th grade (in UA there is no 4th): decimal fractions
6th grade: negative numbers
7th grade: powers, polynoms, trigonometric functuions
8th grade: roots, quadratic equations
9th grade: exponential functions and logarithms
10th grade: introduction to set theroy
11th grade: derivative and integrals.

If I had the power, I would completely change the program of first seven grades. I think, for example, that negative numbers are much easier for a kid than common fractions...

Why is there no fourth grade?

Negative numbers are easy to understand, what I don't understand is how people DON'T understand negative numbers!

As Mum said, I learnt about negative numbers before I started school, and did brilliantly for the rest of primary school.

The earlier you learn about subjects in school, the better you will do.

As for repeatedly writing the same letter over and over, I got bored of doing that and now my handwriting's terrible, but I am a quick typist!

I guess to make the school look like 11 years though these are 10. There was a 4th grade before late 1980s (and there were 10 grades) but it disappeared for unknown to me reason. So my own first overjumping a grade sounds a bit more impressive than it was (from 2nd to 5th, but there is no 4th).

That's a lot more stuff and sooner than we do in the US!

I can recognize okay when comparing negative numbers, or a negative number and a positive number, though I do have to consider it. The additon, subtraction, multiplication and division are what are difficult! I can understand reading it wrong and getting mistaken, but to insist after looking at it again that it is correct, she shows that she just doesn't have the education.

This is too bad. There are plenty of people more than capable of this type of thing who just don't bother with it.

Fractions were a nightmare for me.

Oh man, that article was so pathetic. lol. Doesn't it get to you when people insist on bellowing their ignorance loudly to everyone because they don't comprehend how wrong they are?