From seeing other videos from Conrad Wolfram and on the TED (Conrad Wolfram: Teaching Kids Real Math with Computers) webpage, I was very interested in watching Wolfram’s video on Teaching Kids Real Math with Computers. In the video, Wolfram provides reasons for why math education should be using computers and technology throughout the curriculum. He begins by saying there are three reasons why math is important to teach: one, technical jobs; two, everyday living; three, logical mind training. He also answers the question:
Wolfram points out that math education today is focused more than ever on the third point, computation. However, in today’s society there are computers to do this for us. He continues to argue that our focus, as math educators, should be on the other three steps. We should be getting out students to understand how to ask the right questions and formulate math problems and then interpret the results, something a computer is not as useful for.
I completely agree with Wolfram in this video. It is an ongoing topic in today’s world of math education. The main reason computation has been greatly stressed in education is because there used to never be such a resource like computers to be able to do the computation for us. Within the last couple decades, we certainly have reached this “math liberation”, as Wolfram says. Where tedious calculations can be made with a computer rather than by hang. We should be teaching our students how to use the computer to make computations, while also teaching them about the concepts of mathematics.
I’ve discussed this concept with many math educators, that have similar opinions about the direction math education should be going. I suppose my next question would be to all of you is if this is our new goal in math education then how do we, as teachers, begin to implement such a curriculum? There is much more to this particular video that Wolfram discusses and I suggest watching the entire video in the link above.
No comments:
Post a Comment