Hi there,
I'm sure you know that I'm a Soroban teacher and obviously biased so take this for what it is.
I've read some of the Vedic math techniques and I personally didn't like the overall philosophy they have regarding calculations.
To me, it seemed like a collection of techniques to handle very specific calculations. (I'm not saying that this example is exactly how Vedic math works since It's been a while since I read the 1 book I had on it) An example on what they might teach is: 1000 - 384 means that you have to learn what 9-3, 9-8 and 10-4 is to find that the answer is 616. Essentially they teach that you can skip the concept of borrowing 10 (for the hundreds and tens) for this type of problem since you know that you will have to borrow it at the end for the one's and you will get the same answer *Source*
http://vedicmaths.org/introduction/tutorial/tutorial.asp#tutorial1This would be counter to a Soroban program that I would teach, where I would emphasize understanding the concept of getting 10 from the larger digit (10 hundreds in a thousand, 10 tens in a hundred, etc) and doing each step correctly.
I think this type of learning creates fewer but more robust rules for children that they can then apply to other problems.
But the cost of course is that the learning curve is slightly steeper since you can't just memorize a rule. I think the good outweighs the costs.
Let me know what you think,
Tom
Digg
