Chapter 1. About Pre-Calculus

It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

—Frank Herbert, Dune (from “The Humanity of Maud’Dib” by the Princess Irulan)

This book attempts, among other things, to present math in a fairly open-ended way. It offers what you might view as a conversational approach to math, which is an older way of teaching math. If you survey the history of math books, you see that a hundred or more years ago authors often tended to teach math using dialogues. In other words, as a reader you would follow a conversation among two or more characters in a dialogue, much along the lines of reading a play. That is not precisely the way this book unfolds, but it is in the background. This book draws from experiences of teaching in computer game development and play settings. When you learn to develop or play a computer game, you seldom stand back and spend a long while learning formal rules. Instead, you follow a path that involves immediately immersing yourself in playing or developing the game. This book tries to follow the same path. It attempts to make learning about math more an activity of conversation than of applying rules. Your study of math then becomes a relaxed form of conversation. To explore this notion in a bit more detail, this chapter offers the following topics:

• Language and conversation

• Visual Formula as a way to play games with math

• Starting the conversation with algebra and trigonometry