On the Lighter Side
January 16, 2010
I happened across this book recently while trolling amazon.com for something or another: The Manga Guide to Calculus
At this point in your career, you may have passed these topics by in high school or college (or suffered through them just enough to pass). I am of the belief that there is much to be learned from number patterns, though, since a) they surround us in nature and in our everyday lives and b) the human brain usually groks them. So, I am a believer in exploration, especially through manga.
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Did you read them? Would you recommend them compared other ‘Get back into maths’ books?
I just ordered them, so can’t provide a review at this point. I will let you know when I have a chance to take a look at them.
Cool! I will then dig out some of the books I bought in a vain attempt to refresh my math skills.
Funny. I just recently encountered these as well, though I haven’t ordered them. Not sure I will, but they look interesting.
This is really interesting in an offshoot kind of way. In conversations with a friend who works with kids with Autism, she told me that in her experience, kids with Autism really get into some anime/manga. Especially Naruto. Part of it is the characters in Naruto and their personal demons (figurative and literal), which I think the kids identify with. The other part is perhaps the exaggerated emotional and facial reactions the characters have. There’s no ambiguity.
I have to wonder if the anime/manga style might be extremely effective for virtual world learning environments for some types of learning and intellectual disabilities.
I’ve ordered “The manga guide to Molecular Biology” and “The Manga Guide To Statistics”. I have a computer science and maths background, but I needed to learn some biology to get a better understanding at my current bioinformatics gig, and it was definitely worth it. Now I’m reading the statistics one because there are so many good examples and analogies to explain some basic statistics concepts to other people when working with these things, so I ordered “The Manga Guide to databases” too for the same reason
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I learned most of what I know of American Football by the recently concluded manga Eyeshield 21. The Japanese are very good and studying complex systems, expressing how said systems work, and then enhancing or improving those systems.
I wouldn’t mind picking up the statistics manga, it is the only one of the three (yes, umm, you listed the stats manga twice) I had a hard time with in school. Possibly because I had to take my statistics course with probability, too…