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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

I've built things with my child, mostly carpentry; ranging from doll beds to chicken pen and furniture and some other things. Whenever possible we draw out plans and have her calculate angles and distances and work up "bill of material" lists. Practical math. Pythagorean theorem is far easier to remember when you have a real use for it (how long do we cut this brace board?).

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You have describen practicing carpentry, not practicing math.

Math, euclidean geometry specifically, is a core part of carpentry.

Core part of carpentry is functional hands, core part of math is functional brains. If doing carpentry is considered doing math, then playing some silly games also may be considered doing math. I do not recommend going that shady way of redefining definitions.

What happens when you don’t involve math in carpentry?

Math is something more than Pythagoras theorem and arithmetic.

By that definition a physicist is also not doing math. Just because it's encapsulated in something else doesn't make it not math.

Not agreed. Most of mathematical universities are phys-maths or mech-math.

For kids, it's easier to make activities with applied math. So my abstract advice is to offload some of the mathly part of the activity to the kid in spite it may be obvious for the adult. It can be applied to carpentry, or cooking, or whatever is your (kid) favorite activity.

Math in cooking? It's like how many cookies will be if we add 2 cookies and 3 cookies?

The recipe says 1 cup of flour and .75 cup of sugar for 24 cookies; but we're making 18, so how much of each do we need now?

Math is everywhere. All you need to do is show it and show how it makes getting things done easier. Show the reason we have "math" to someone and they'll want to learn it on their own.

Yes! My 5 yo daughter can count up to 12 or 19, perhaps 29 with some help. But she only groks up to 5. For example she understand that 5-2=3, but she does not understand that 6-2=4. (In a story, like "There are 5 apples on a table, and I eat 2, how many are left?") She is improving, but it's slowly than what imagined before having kids.

As the sibling comment explains, for older kids proportions is a natural and important topic, but it's too much for my daughter yet. (I recommend to start doubling or halving the recipes, and later more advanced stuff like 18/24.)

I guess it's not possible to advance too much after that with kids, but there are a few nice initial activities.

One way of saying you're not a good carpenter.

Yeah, and programmers don’t practice logic. Got any other zingers for us?

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