"You, the ruler of Goldland, suspect that your treasurer is cheating you by substituting one fake coin for one real coin in every bag of 25 coins you store," Karen Doyle Walton told her class. To find out if this is true, she continued, you decide to put him to the test.
Being a fair ruler, you decide to give him the benefit of the doubt and choose only one coin from each of 25 bags. But if even one counterfeit coin appears, you know you have him cornered.
Her students sat in the classroom that hot day in August and giggled as they grabbed 25 bingo chips out of a bag one at a time, in hopes of getting that counterfeit red "coin."
Painstakingly, they recorded the colors chosen from each bag. Cheers echoed through the room as one of the students dropped his bag of chips and they scattered over the floor. "There's one in every class," exclaimed Walton.
After the experiment was over and the treasurer implicated by the results which were tallied by calculator, Walton told the students to focus their attention to the microcomputer terminals that sat in front of them and call up a probability program. Within minutes, the results of the choices from not 25, but several thousand bags flashed onto the terminals.
While reactions of the students were typical, ranging from amazement to skepticism, the students themselves were not.
All were area high school math teachers.
The class, one of a series of 15 daylong workshops entitled Computer Applications to the Teaching of High School Mathematics held this past summer at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, was funded by a $21,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education after a needs assessment conducted by Walton last February indicated a high level of interest among area math teachers for such computer workshops.
Why this interest? Why did more than 250 teachers give up one or more days of their summer to sit through such instruction?
The answer is simple according to Walton. "Teachers now have to deal with kids who take computers for granted. Someone must educate the teachers in computers or they will continue to be frightened by them."
But do kids really take computers, other than video games, for granted? Do teachers really feel a need to be computer literate?
The answer to both questions is yes.
Within the past five years computers have made their way into the curricula of most public schools on both the elementary and secondary levels.
Teachers, many of whom are only recently versed in the workings and applications of the machines, must now deal with children who have been exposed to computer instruction within the schools since third grade.
These newly implemented computer curricula are not passing fads. Like the computer age that spawned them, they, too, are here to stay.
What will change and is currently changing is the direction and speed of their growth. While a relatively uniform curriculum does not yet exist, the increasing demands of colleges and the increased use of computers in a wide variety of professions may make that possibility a goal of the not-so-distant future.
With one eye focused on that future, the other on the present and past memories clear in their minds, administrators in the Lehigh Valley school districts have made sure their districts are no exceptions to the rule. The past five years have been years of unbelievable growth in the area of computer curricula and equipment in the Lehigh Valley school districts.
In the 1981-82 school year, for example, the Allentown school district had no microcomputers available for student use despite the fact that a programming course was initiated at the high school level. Currently, they have almost 250, according to Glenn Smartschan, assistant to the superintendent for curriculum and community services.
This increase in hardware is directly proportional to the increase in courses offered in the computer curriculum and in the number of students taking those courses.
It was in the 1982-83 school year that the district began a three-year plan to phase in a computer literacy and awareness program at the elementary level by offering a pilot course for the fifth grade. The following year the sixth graders who had already received training the year before continued, and a new class of fifth graders were exposed to the literacy course.
Last year, the literacy program was extended again to include the fourth and seventh grades. This year, the phase-in process came to an end as the third and eighth grades had computer literacy added to their curricula.
Currently, half of the students enrolled in the district - about 5,100, are participating in the program which utilizes two different types of microcomputers and provides the students with basic awareness and literacy as well as the knowledge that a computer is a useful tool.