When do you think kids start graphing on X and Y axes?
Again–what’s your basis for this? How often have you seen kids play it, and how many mistakes do they make, and how confused do they get, and the kids you’re talking about, where are they on the spectrum of math learners?
I truly think people in this thread aren’t clear on how difficult many children find it to learn math, and how slowly it must be done for the vast majority of children.
It begins with basic bar graphs in first and second grade. Those grade appropriate basic skills that set up the progression to coordinate pair graphing.
When do you think it starts?
Having been a child, a parent, and an uncle. The game is aimed at 7 plus because that’s when it is pretty easy for most kids to quickly master the basic concept of B2 means row B colum 2. Some kids can master it earlier of course. There is a spectrum, sure. Most by 7. Quickly. Frustration tolerance to learn a game whose basics are not easy to master is low at that age.
You’re right–I was distracted by terminology, my bad.
I think I first understood the passage of time from watching an old mechanical clock with a sweeping pendulum. (I was preschool age.) Time is how long it takes the pendulum to sweep from left to right to left again. You count that and that’s how long it’s been.
But instead of counting it yourself, there’s this clever device on top that counts it for you. Each sweep moves the thin hand one step. When that hand moves all the wave around, the next hand moves one step. And as that hand moves all the way around, the fat hand has moved to the next number.
In terms of pedagogy for teaching time, the pendulum and the counting device seems to me the most intuitive way to do it. Of course, when I read a digital time display, I internally convert it into the hands on a clock face, so I’m likely an outlier. I see “14:42” and think “quarter to three”.
That’s fair. My kids learned battleship instantly, and i don’t recall them making any mistakes. But my kids are near the top of the spectrum for math learners, and i haven’t played battleship with any other kids.
What I meant was that being able to read an analog clock means being able to ‘see’ how time passes with the mechanised hands moving from number to number. To me, that is telling time. Reading digitised numbers isn’t the same as seeing and deciphering all the numbers and increments on an analog clockface.
Or 24 hours once to a 24 hour day.
I’m convinced all the extollation of the supposed “superiority” of analog time representations are simply convenient back derivations purely to mask that it’s a system you’re more familiar with.
My evidence is that analog was only ever used to display dynamic time, we have never used it (except as an affectation) to convey static representations of time. We would never write: “Let’s meet at 
at the Movie Theater”, we don’t call it “The 
News”, we don’t say “The party starts at 
so we should leave at 
”, we don’t do it with digital text but we’ve also never done it with handwritten text either in the entire centuries when analog clocks were the only clocks.
It was simply mechanically more convenient to build mechanisms that represented time in a totally different way from every other usage of time we’ve ever adopted and then, as soon as it became possible to represent dynamic time the way it has been represented in every other medium, it was rapidly adopted.
If analog time were genuinely superior in the ways that have been posited in this thread, you’d see people reaching for it as a natural communication tool for, eg: planning out, who needs to be ready when if we all have to get out the front door in the morning at 8. Instead, we either write them out in raw numbers and expect everyone to do the math or, if it’s exceedingly complex, we model it via a Gantt Chart or some other visual representation that displays numbers as linear blocks of time, not radial.
That in the entire history of mechanical clocks, we’ve never found it useful it enough to naturally adopt anywhere else is strong evidence to me that it’s a arbitrary, complicated system that has no intrinsic advantages and is only propped up by dying nostalgia.
I think an important aspect of education is encouraging “connections.” Teaching the various methods of timekeeping through history bears on so many aspects of physics, astrophysics, history, the scientific method…. How did we learn the earth is round? How did we solve the problem of longitude? An analog clock can also be applied to various math concepts. In my non-educator’s mind, that makes learning the analog clock face to be of non-negligible merit.
I suppose looking at a digital display can connect with other digital displays one encounters…
Which is part of the problem. Really understanding that 1:30 is very different than 1.30 … it is an exceptional digital display.
Almost every schedule I’ve seen (of conventions or similar events where you need to understand the temporal relationship of things) is represented graphically, not just with numbers. Yes, it’s typically represented as a bar chart, not as a pie chart. But you start with the beginning at the top of the page and move down the page, often with spacing proportional to the amount of time, although sometimes just one space per event. Still, schedules are pretty much never given in a paragraph. Which would be adequate it the raw numbers for times were enough.
This alleged “evidence” is pretty silly. The thing about written text is that it is fundamentally a representation of spoken language. We speak about quantification of time by saying numbers, not by stretching out our arms in various positions to represent hour angles, so of course our written representation of quantified time is numerical too. That doesn’t automatically mean that the analog representation of time is useless or pointless.
You might just as well complain that using arrows to show direction is artificial and useless because nobody ever writes, for example, “I took a ← at the intersection and found the trailhead on the → side of the road, and then hiked ^ the mountain.” We don’t use the corresponding gestures to represent those words in spoken language, either (unless we’re signing, for example): we say the words that indicate direction, because that’s how language operates.
Except this is exactly what we do on wayfinding signs. This is evidence that we’ve found natural other uses for arrow pointing because it’s the most natural way of conveying that information. We don’t see anything similar for clock representations.
Zero is as child
Sounds like the start of some profound beat poetry, you dig?
I’ve often thought of mentioning this to you but haven’t to this point because I think it’s a little stuffy (or something else mildly bothersome but not too bad).
You seem to have more problems with auto-correct mistakes than anyone I know of. It might be worth it to proofread your posts a little more closely before you pull the trigger. Usually the error is obvious but sometimes it’s not and one must ask you.
Or maybe you can better configure your auto-correct? (is that possible?)
We do. Minute timers are round, like clocks. Schedules, as i mentioned above, are usually written as bar charts, rather than pie charts, but are also presented with space representing time.
The funky thing is overlapping two clocks on top of each other, (hours and minutes) but that’s not fundamental to the representation, it’s just the most common way to neatly stack scales. I have a circular slide rule with a similar feature.
I am both a bad typist and a little dyslexic, making me a very bad proofreader. And sometimes my phone changes the text after i see it, which is annoying as all hell.
I’ve had that happen too. On my phone but on my desktop browser, too. 
Not true. Exactly the same implementation is used on analog aircraft altimeters, and for exactly the same reason as on analog clocks, namely because in both cases there’s a need to display a wide range of values but simultaneously a need for more fine-grained accuracy. The natural solution is different hands that represent different ranges on the same dial. It’s not complicated and can be understood at a glance.
There’s really two separate overlapping discussions here:
Do analogue clocks have added value utility over digital time pieces for general use?
Is the process of learning how to tell time on an analogue clock in first and second grade worthwhile?
The answer to the first informs some to the second - if it is a valuable skill for its own sake (and I am in the camp that believes it is; and I have my watch set to a clock face for that reason) then the second is yes as a no brainer.
But to me the second is a definite yes even one believes that analogue clocks and watches are as archaic as eight tracks, because of their value in teaching so many math concepts and setting the stage for the acquisition of many more, and for understanding what these time numbers mean, very different than the base ten scale they are otherwise mostly learning.