As I approach my 70th year in physics, let me tell my younger colleagues about my adventures with computation. When I was 14, my father gave me a slide rule because I appeared to be headed toward a career in physics. Since then, I have had experience with many other calculating devices.

Which manual calculation skills are still needed when students use graphic/symbolic calculators or computers with computer algebra systems (CAS)? What should students be able to do manually, i.e. just using paper and pencil? This text is the outcome of a two-day discussion on these questions, held by the four authors. Our answers and proposals are…

Both computers and calculators are limited by architecture, operating system, and software, to some predetermined level of precision within decimal number presentation and calculation. However, there exists a base that produces a terminating decimal. (MM)

Although printed in 1970, "Teaching Children Thinking" was conceived in 1968 and bears the signs of the heady atmosphere of that time. The most explicit idea in "Teaching Children Thinking" is that children could be in charge of computers, not computers in charge of the children by offering what was the new image of children…