- Showing students how their spoken language connects to logic constructs can be incredibly helpful.
- Activity:
- Step 1: Illustrate AND/OR using English
- “I’m wearing a green shirt AND I am wearing blue shoes”” Point out that if you said AND, they both have to be true
- “I’m wearing a green shirt OR I am wearing blue shoes”IPoint out that since you said OR at least one one of these must be true.
- When teaching logic, students will ask how to implement the English convention “and/or”, which is just OR. When students want to do “X and/or Y,” what they mean in logic is just X OR Y.
- Step 2: Replace English phrases with variables L and M
- Note: Using variables A and B may be more common, but can create confusion in sentences because “A” is also a word.
- Introduce variables L and M to replace the phrases surrounding the logical operands with. Explain that it doesn’t really matter what the statement is! Let’s call the first statement L and there other statement M.
- Step 3: Introduce logic tables
- Walk through individual lines of the logic table and ask students to predict what the answer would be. Explain, if L is true and M is true, is L AND M true?
- After you’ve drawn out the table, introduce the mnemonic “OR means MORE” to help students remember that an OR creates more true statements.
- Step 1: Illustrate AND/OR using English