Digitial Clocks handicapping children's pereption of time?

[bradwalt]

Is the popularity of digital clocks making it harder for children to work out simple problems in computing elapsed time?

A piano teacher friend says her young students are puzzled by expressions such as “twenty to eight” and “quarter to 6”, so she’s learned to rephrase these as 7:40 and 5:45.

But can kids today work out the practical applications of time-keeping such as: “If your lesson started ten minutes late (11:40) when should it end?”

The Analogue Clock generation could conjure up a mental image of a clock and look at the geometry of the clock face to compute elapsed time problems of this nature.

And yes, schools still teach kids to read analogue clocks, but they just don’t get much chance to practice this skill anymore!!!

[Edward_The_Head]

From what I remember from Child ed class children have very little understand of elapsed time hence the “are we there yet?” question. Perhaps the Twenty to Eight has been phased out of the way people talk and now people say 7:40.

I don’t think that digital clocks are hurting time telling since I’ve had one since I was a child, early 80s, and have no problems with elapsed time.

[bradwalt]

But if I tell you “It’ll take me 45 minutes to get there” and it’s now 2:20, how does your mind do that arithmetic?

My mind pictures an analog clock, and I see 10 minutes till the “bottom of the hour” add 30 minutes (half a pie) to the top, then another 5, giving me 3:05.

I guess you could just add 2:20 and :45 and get 2:65 (or 3:05) but that’s not the way my mind does it!

[Dravin]

Needless to say not all people’s minds work the same way, for that is exactly how I do it.

[yabob]

People in the UK prior to decimalization of the currency learned to make change in groups of 20 and 12 without a graphical aid for it. Similar skill. BTW, I DO mentally add 45 to 2:20, come up with 2:65 and convert that to 3:05. I’ve noticed that if I happen to be staring at an analog clock face, I’ll do what you suggest, but if I’m simply doing the calculation mentally, I’ll just do the base 60 arithmetic.

If “N to M” type constructs are getting phased out of the language, it might actually be a good thing, as it simplifies the way we express times and is less confusing.

I’ll admit that I can’t see Chicago singing “3:34 or 35” though.

[neutron_star]

I grew up on digital clocks and I say “twenty of four” or “quarter of eight.” I don’t, however, say “half past nine,” as some older folks do.

I’m not sure that I understand how a digital clock is supposed to make it harder to get such concepts. I mean, when I say “twenty of four,” what do you do? Take twenty minutes away from four and get 3:40. It’s not like you need a pen and paper or a picture of a clock to do that math.

Originally posted by bradwalt ***
I guess you could just add 2:20 and :45 and get 2:65 (or 3:05) but that’s not the way my mind does it!*

I’d just ask myself how many minutes there are until 3. Forty? Okay, well then what’s the difference between the number of minutes until 3 and the total number of minutes? Five? Add that to 3. 3:05. The number 2:65 would never enter my head.

[AHunter3]

When I was a kid – eons before the debut of digital watches and clocks in case you’re wondering – I found analogue-clock nomenclature confusing as hell.

“Quarter past” / “Quarter till” – ?? a quarter is 25¢, so you’re using a cute way to say 25 past ??

“Five of twelve” – ?? – does this silly grownup mean 5:12, 4:55, 12:05, 11:55??

And since, when you’re reading a clock yourself, the first thing you figure out is the hour, it’s really confusing when you’re a kid and people speak time starting with the minutes instead – “ten 'til three”, “twenty past five” – ??

Even reading analogue clock faces is initially a messy business. First you look where the little hand is pointing and that’s the hour, right? But most of the time the little hand is pointed to somewhere in the limbo area between numbers, and when you’re first learning the area clockwise from one number to the next doesn’t intrinsically intuitively “belong” to the preceding number. And where is the little hand pointing? It’s pointing at one of the little lines between numbers. You know, the little lines that they said mean “one minute each”. Which mean nothing of the sort when the hour hand is pointing at them (actually they are 12-minute lines as far as the hour hand is concerned, but no one teaches you that, do they?). So as a literal-minded child, you go “OK, so the little hand is two and a half marks past three, that is three o’clock and two and a half more, and the big hand is one mark past the six, that’s five ten fifteen twenty twenty five, twenty six, and so it’s three and two and a half o’clock twenty six???”

Then you go home and the alarm clock next to your bed has four marks between each hour instead of five. Not to mention the clock in the living room that only has a 12 and a 6 and a bunch of lines on it. LInes that are hours and not minutes. In fact, quite frankly it’s confusing to have lines and numbers where you’re kind of supposed to ignore the numbers if the minute hand is pointing to them (the “2” doesn’t mean anything, it’s really “10”) and you’re kind of supposed to ignore the lines if the hour hand is pointing to them (12-minute marks, as I said, but as I said no one talks about that).

Uh uh. I was insisting on digital time long before I ever saw a digital clock (serious little kid referring to the time as “four thirteen” or “five fifty” and demanding confirmation from others of their meaning when they say “quarter past eight” etc). Digital is easier. Digital makes sense.

(Not quite as much sense as it would make if we ditched base 60 and AM/PM and went with a 1000-milliday day clock, but better than analogue by far)

[SirRay]

Well, the children of today won’t understand old folk stories like these (from the golden age of railroading):

Passenger gets on the train without a ticket, and tells the conductor he works for the railroad, but forgot his pass. Conductor is a bit suspicious, but lets it go for a while. Eventually Conductor comes back to passenger, chit-chats for a while, and then off-handed asks what time it is.
Passenger replies “Oh, a quarter to 11”
Conductor: “Well, I’ve have to trouble you to pay your fare now, as a real railroad man would have said 10:45”

[DanBlather]

*Originally posted by yabob *
**If “N to M” type constructs are getting phased out of the language, it might actually be a good thing, as it simplifies the way we express times and is less confusing.

I’ll admit that I can’t see Chicago singing “3:34 or 35” though. **

ROTFL

[Apollyon]

*Originally posted by AHunter3 *
**When I was a kid – eons before the debut of digital watches and clocks in case you’re wondering – I found analogue-clock nomenclature confusing as hell. **

AHunter3, you may be pleased to know (or not care in the least ) that usability expert Don Norman agrees with you over the difficulties of using an analog clock.

He writes in The Design of Everyday Things,

[the analog clock face] presents a horrid, classic example of the mapping problem… The problem is that we use two or three different hands moving around the same circle, each one meaning something different and operating on a different scale. Which hand is which? (Do you remember how hard it is to teach a child the difference between the little hand and the big hand, and not to confuse the second hand – which is sometimes big, sometimes little – with the minute hand or the hour hand?)

To the OP however, he notes that,

Digital timepieces are controversial; in changing the representation of time, the power of the analog form has been lost, and it is now more difficult to make quick judgements about time. The digital display makes it easier to to determine exact time, but harder to make estimates or to see approximately how much time has passed since an earlier reading.

His point here is that I can look at my digital watch and tell you that it is 8:38am, but that to translate that and say “about twenty to nine” takes more time / cognitive load than if I was reading an analog watch. On the other hand, a preference for “twenty to nine” over “8:38” may itself be a product of familiarity and early childhood training with the analog timepiece, and the preference may reverse with a digital generation.

[Chronos]

Why, oh, why, would people have ever used constructions like “twenty 'till nine”? How is that any easier than “forty past eight”? I can understand “quarter 'till”, since that is a bit simpler than “three quarters past”. I could, I suppose, even understand “third 'till nine”. But why twenty 'till?

The one exception to this would be when something significant is happening at a particular time. For instance, if I’m hanging out with classmates (who all use digital timepieces) before a class which starts at 11:00, I might refer to the time as twenty 'till, or ten 'till, meaning “Twenty minutes before we have to get to class”. Then again, if a class starts at 3:10 and it’s 3:00 now, I might also say “Ten minutes 'till quantum”, or some such.

And call me weird, but for bradwalt’s mental math problem, I went “Well, if it were 2:15, then 45 more minutes would be 3:00. But it’s 5 minutes later than 2:15, so 45 minutes will be 5 minutes more than 3:00, or 3:05.”.

[RickJay]

*Originally posted by neutron star *
**I grew up on digital clocks and I say “twenty of four” or “quarter of eight.” I don’t, however, say “half past nine,” as some older folks do.

I’m not sure that I understand how a digital clock is supposed to make it harder to get such concepts. I mean, when I say “twenty of four,” what do you do? Take twenty minutes away from four and get 3:40. It’s not like you need a pen and paper or a picture of a clock to do that math.

Except, when you said “twenty of four,” I assumed you meant 4:20, not 3:40. I’ve never heard a person say “X of Y” to describe time.

Like AHunter, I found clock terminology baffling when I was a kid; the halves and quarters weren’t very well explained. When my first grade teacher sat down and explained the clock mathematically, I instantly understood how it worked. And THEN the “half past” and “quarter to” terms began to make sense.

[Lobelia_Overhill]

I remember my friend’s then two year old daughter yelling at me all the way home from the shops “I want my sweets” I kept saying “In a minute” then it dawned on me, this child can’t even count to two, so what does wait a minute mean to her? so I tried a different tack … “When we get back to the house, and I’ve taken my jacket and shoes off, I’ll give you your sweets” Now she had something she could relate to she remained quiet until we got to the house, I took my jacket off and started to take one shoe off, “I WANY MY SWEETS!” I told her I hadn’t taken both shoes off yet, so she stood back and waited till I had …
I’ve frequently wanted to hand this advice on to women with screaming kids in supermarkets “wait a minute, wait a minute” isn’t going to man anything to a howling toddler!

[hermann]

You mean, kind of like when your SO will be ready “in a minute”?