Attention Spans for Math and Stories (2019)

Summary

Editor’s note: This essay was originally published in 2019. I have made minor edits in this republishing.There was a MathOverflow thread about mathematically interesting games for 5–6 year olds. A lot of the discussion revolved around how young age 5 really is, and how we should temper expectations because we don’t really remember what it’s like to be 5. In response to an enormous answer by Alexander Chervov, user LSpice quipped, “‘Daddy, daddy, let’s play another in the infinite indexed family of perfect-information draw-free cheap-to-construct two-player games!’” That being said, Martín-Blas Pérez Pinilla’s “sprouts” game piqued my interest to find optimal strategies.Most abstract logic games that are interesting to mathy folks are only interesting when you start asking questions beyond core gameplay. For example, the game Set is interesting when you ask, “how many cards can you have with no set?” or similar tricks to determine the last un-dealt card in a deck just by viewing the remaining board. These have little to do with skill at playing the game.I’ve found that children under a certain age, maybe 7 or 8, haven’t learned how to be curious about such questions yet. They like knowing things and experiencing things. They enjoy surprising patterns or natural phenomena (like vinegar and baking soda), but still aren’t really curious enough about them to be persistent in studying them.For children to exercise mathematical reasoning skills, and for teachers and parents to get the opportunity to teach curiousity and persistence, they have to be motivated. People with an eye for science, people who in their adulthood marvel at the splendor of nature, often neglect that at age 5, there is one simple thing that kids embrace with all their being, justification-free, which can be used as a vessel for abstract reasoning: storytelling. Be good at storytelling.A few years ago, my cousin’s daughter was 5 years old. I’ll refer to her as Anna. Anna is of Hungarian descent, lives ...