AIUI, what SolveIt describes is more like a reduction relation (‘leads to’) than imperative assignment. And it’s not that surprising, because you have to know about evaluating expression before you can use equality in any non-trivial way.
I don’t want to speak for SolveIt, but “result of computation” presupposes a different outcome for a counterfactually different computation input. Which is a very important difference between equality and what I call “imperative assignment.”
But I agree that kids natively perceiving [equations as a symbol game] vs [equations as causal systems] are different hypotheses, and we ought to be able to test which is correct.
AIUI, what SolveIt describes is more like a reduction relation (‘leads to’) than imperative assignment. And it’s not that surprising, because you have to know about evaluating expression before you can use equality in any non-trivial way.
I don’t want to speak for SolveIt, but “result of computation” presupposes a different outcome for a counterfactually different computation input. Which is a very important difference between equality and what I call “imperative assignment.”
But I agree that kids natively perceiving [equations as a symbol game] vs [equations as causal systems] are different hypotheses, and we ought to be able to test which is correct.