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Comment by verbify | Hacker News Reader

I'm disappointed to hear that ruler and compass constructions didn't engage them. I'm currently working on digitising a Hebrew translation of Euclid's Elements, and I was hoping that the very physical aspect (almost like art class) would be more engaging than theoretical stuff, and the fact that it's independent of any numbers would make it less scary than usual maths class. I still think there's educational value in Euclid's Elements beyond the historical importance, but it seems that I might be wrong on it being more engaging in an educational context for most kids.

> Trying to figure out who is better at penalty kicks based on counts of scores/misses.

If you have kids who care about a particular sport, this is a great way to teach linear algebra. There's a book 'Who's #1? - The Science of Rating and Ranking' that goes through different methods of ratings/rankings in great detail (it was one of the required readings for my MSc in Data Science).

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In case this is of interest, and unknown, there's an aesthetically pleasant digitization of Euclid's elements[0]. But I'm not sure whether it's best for studying: usually, actively engaging with the material is key (e.g. performing the constructions, without a model), thought the effective rules for kids might be different.

I'm actually happy to see them interested in propositional logic, given how foundational it can be to coherent thinking. I would have guessed, as the author, that manual activities would have been preferred.

[0]: https://www.c82.net/euclid/#books

Well from the way the linked article describes it, there is no 'story' to maths like Euclidian geometry.

After all, what were the original motivations for compass and straightedge constructions? Ideas about perfection, symmetry, and constructability are all very abstract.

I found https://www.euclidea.xyz/ to be fun, but then I find drawing Girih patterns fun, and I'm also not 8 years old :)

I only gained an appreciation for ruler and compass constructions early in secondary school, at age 7 I'm not sure I could fully understand the beauty of deriving a huge system from axioms.

For making Euclid interesting to children, I remember really enjoying a game called Euclidea: https://www.euclidea.xyz/

I remember learning about hyperbolic and spherical geometry in middle school, and that was cool. Not really because of the axiomatic aspect, but more of the "how many lines can you draw through two points? Up to you!" sort of questioning of mathematical assumptions and the funny diagrams. The Fano projective plane model was interesting, the Poincaré disk model was interesting. I remember some animations and some interactive software you could play with. But yeah, after about a week I got bored of it. I would say one 2-hour session devoted to different geometries and constructions would probably be about right.

The Euclid's Elements approach of axiomatic geometry is interesting, and suitable for maybe a high school course. Before students learn algebra they don't really have an appreciation of deriving equations or proofs from a small starting point. And coordinate geometry is much more practical (some things are simply unconstructible with ruler and compass).

I don't know the setup used for the ruler and compass constructions, but there's a game called Euclidea [1] which may be of interest. I found the level progression, scoring system, and solving proofs to unlock new "tools" was done very well.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hil_hk.euc...

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