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By Prof. Dr. Bruno COLMANT, Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium
When the first electronic calculators appeared half a century ago, the question was raised whether they should be allowed in secondary school classes. Beyond the social inequalities (these machines were expensive), the question concerned the possible loss of critical sense associated with using the device. Before calculating a square root, would a student have blindly transcribed that the square root of 9 would have been 3 or 9.48 if he had erroneously encoded 90 rather than 9? If this doubt is smiling today, it was founded. So I learned to extract square roots by written calculation and using a slide rule.
The same type of concern will soon beset education and many...
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