I approached this talk on Math Education as a skeptic -I have always thought that the idea of letting the computer do all the work sounds great but is flawed. Of course, I don't like the idea of presenting math in the schools as mainly rules of calculation, but I feared that using calculators wouldn't be much better. If a student is asked to find out how much it costs in all to buy a hammer for $23 and a pair of pliers for $17 and if he hits the multiply button instead of the add button will he realize that $391 is simply impossible? Most people with a traditional math education will realize this immediately (I hope) but if a person taught that numbers are nothing more than things that come out of a calculator might not see any problem with an answer of $391. The traditional approach does provide some intuition about numbers. Even worse, the student who pushes the wrong button and gets marked wrong, might see math as a boring subject where you have to be so very careful about pushing the right buttons. Not unlike the student who only learns meaningless rules of calculation who is bored by the need to be so very careful about using the rules precisely.
I was somewhat relieved when I actually listened to the talk. He actually said that mental arithmetic could be useful and he outlined a bold approach to math that I would applaud. My fear remains that if his program were adopted, the ambitious parts of it, which I like, would only be given lip service, while the message would get through to the schools that math is the same except without the drudgery. On 11/28/10 2:06 AM, "Pieter Steenekamp" <piet...@randcontrols.co.za> wrote: I found the TED talk on math education at http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html very interesting. In summary, this guy says that our math education is wrong. He defines math broadly as the the process of (1) translating a problem to a mathematical form; (2) deciding what result is required mathematically; (3) doing the computation; and (4) interpreting the result. His point is that math education focuses on doing the computation by hand whilst that could be done very easily by computer. He reckons math education should focus on the points 1,2 & 4 and let the computer do the computation.
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