Abstract:

There is no doubt that technical mathematical language produces certain dislike and mental blocks in some students towards learning maths. Process like evaluating logic expressions or understanding arithmetic operations on positional numerical systems are hard to learn for them due to the mathematical jargon used on them. In this paper we use the programming language of a virtual quilt sewing machine for eliminating such jargon and teach some mathematical concepts. Quilt is a functional/logic programming language defined with a simple syntactic structure but a powerful semantic engine that makes programming the virtual quilt sewing machine a non tedious task. Quilt programming language is similar to Prolog but instead of using predicates, it allows to define functions.

Such functions can be defined using previously defined functions and two basic quilt sewing machine operations:
i) rotate a quilt and
ii) sew quilts of the same height. These operations are represented by symbols @ and | respectively.

The result of a program is a quilt that is graphically drawn. For example, it is possible to develop logic operations as quilt sewing operations if considering some remnants as parenthesis, some as logic connectors, and some as truth values. Also, it is possible to consider some remnants as mathematical digits (binary, tetrary, decimal or other base), and some as arithmetic operation symbols in order to develop arithmetic operations. All these mathematical operations can be defined without mathematical concepts such as number or truth value. As can be notice, these approach is a constructive one.

Keywords:

Logic, Arithmetic, Programming.