It's a trick! The equation is short a set of parenthesis' on purpose. LOL
However, if someone was really trying to figure things out by formig a word problem the equation would likely have turned out with the more conventional look of an expression like 2(2+2)/8=n
Human nature will most often deal with what we've got on hand before we divvy them up right?
But "grade school math" doesn't come with a specification to resolve these kinds of ambiguities, without additional punctuation or spacing to clear up the confusion. From context we can tell that the space between the first 2 and lead parenthetical ( is intended as an implicit multiplication operator. But it's ambiguous whether an implicit multiplication operator carries a higher binding power than an explicit op (X or *). It kind of leads the eye to believe that it is, because its two operands are physically more tightly packed (I would argue this is a reasonable, but not necessary assumption in the absence of extra information). In that case, you'd evaluate it before the divide op and the answer is 1. However, if the implicit multiply op is intended to have the same binding power as explicit multi and divide, then the left-to-right evaluation applies and the little girl's answer of 16 is correct. As it stands, any teacher assigning this - without also providing a more stringent definition of operator precedence, better spacing/formatting, or extra grouping parenthesis to disambiguate - is a jerk.
Computer programming languages - almost all of which contain expression languages that approximate grade school math (sans the implicit mult operators) - usually come with very stringently defined language specifications to avoid ambiguities like this.
The whole point of the article, which I thought was well written, is that when something is kept a bit ambiguous, people argue over it a lot. And even though the article said that, people kept arguing in large numbers over the solution. Hence it reminded me of audiophiles and I put it up here.
I had eight badges but my idiot assistant accidentally threw have of them away so now I have to do two runs of two sets apiece because my damn printer can't do more than 2 copies at a time in case he throws the original eight away!! Whuh? That's still wrong! LOL!