Well, after a week off doing other things we're back in harness again, back to the writing and editing of scripts. We're still working on persuading children to think of arithmatic operators as things that manupulate equations rather than buttons on a calculator which magically produce an answer.
When I was teaching Physics, I compiled a mechanics question whose answer had a numerical value of "5". All the pupils produced an answer of "4.99". For the weaker pupils I marked this as correct, but for the most able pupils I marked it wrong. The most able pupils, naturally, complained and were not greatly mollified by the explanation that they got it wrong, when others with the same answer got it right, because I expected better from them. Actually, I expected better from all the pupils, but when one has a class of 22, which one sees infrequently, and a tight schedule of work to be completed, one has to be realistic about what one can achieve. My job then was to teach them Physics, not to remedy the shortcomings in their Mathematics. I tried for those whom I thought I could remedy in passing, and accepting the status quo for the others, but it has always rankled with me that this class did not manipulate mathematical expressions properly.
When I moved on to teaching Maths, I made sure that my pupils learnt the algorithms and techniques to solve the problems without continual recourse to their calculators. This is what I intend Puppet Maths to achieve as well. Maths isn't difficult, all it requires is that pupils learn a few routines, and then apply them to the problems they have. The puppets are there to make learning the routines fun, and more memorable.