"Could Storytelling Be the Secret Sauce to STEM Education?"

"The lover looks up at the princess and sees that she knows which door contains the tiger. She indicates which door the man should choose, but the story ends before the reader discovers what was behind the door. The reader also learns that the princess is just as feisty as her father, so there’s a possibility she’s sending her lover to death so he won’t marry another woman.

“It’s an old-fashioned sexist story where the end comes down to the princess’ psychology,” Fruchter said. But he appreciates it for the way it beautifully mimics binary code. In computer language, this is a “one bit” story, meaning there are two possible versions and two possible endings. In a computer, the two endings would be expressed with either a one or a zero.

When teaching, Fruchter changes the story’s ending to give the lover agency. Now the story is a “two bit” problem. The lover can either trust or mistrust the princess, and the princess can either save or doom her lover. Now there are four possible endings to the story. Fruchter then adds another character to the story: the man holding the tiger behind the door. Presumably, the princess talked to this man to find out what door he would be behind. But what if he’s been in love with the princess his whole life and can either choose to tell her the truth or a lie? Now the story is a “three bit” problem...

he finds that many kids with learning difficulties or who have struggled in other classes stay in the game longer when they have a narrative entry point. They can use their understanding of the story to try to puzzle their way through the math...

He also likes Dashiell Hammett’s famous detective novel “The Maltese Falcon” and “Mind of My Mind” by Octavia Butler, a book where psychics take over the world. Fruchter says Butler’s book is an embodiment of the proper way to write an object-oriented program."
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/06/05/could-storytelling-be-the-secret-sauce-to-stem-education/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150606

I like this. There is totally poetry in math. And it's making me think about the structures of stories and books.