Tag: Wolfram

Posted in Math videos

A 21st century skill: reading and writing codes

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In Should We Do Away with Calculation, Conrad Wolfram says that if you want to know if students understands a computational procedure, ask them to do a program, let them code it.Here is another video which calls students to learn coding. The video titled What Schools Don’t Teach featuring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, and other software developer giants speaking, urges kids to learn how to write codes. Reading and writing codes should now indeed be part of our curriculum. And for the arts inclined? Well to borrow from WordPress: ‘Code is poetry’.

What schools don’t teach video promotes code.org, a nonprofit foundation created to help computer programming education grow.

To drive the point, see the graph below from code.org.

computer programming

Posted in Math videos, Mathematics education

Should we do away with calculation?

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We don’t need to spend much time with calculation. Technology can do that for us. We can use the extra time saved for engaging in ‘higher-level’ thinking. Mr. Conrad Wolfram in his TEd Education Talk makes a lot of sense in this video. But, I have my reservations but not because I’m for teaching a lot of calculations.

We also said the same during the era of calculator. Did it improve the math education of our youth? So, what makes us think it will happen in the age of Mathematica, GeoGebra, Sketchpad? There is something in our math classes or math education that’s stuck in the middle ages, that’s not keeping with time. Unless we find and address this, no amount of technology can help us.