As an educator who always seeks to prepare our students for the real world and real world math, I found Conrad Wolfram’s TED talk to be very enlightening. Most admirable is how the Wolfram brothers not only identify issues with our current system of mathematics education, but have spent their lives building global solutions to these problems with WolframAlpha, Mathematica, and Wolfram Science. I believe that if we don’t pay attention to this line of thinking we may be left behind on many different levels. I would enjoy your feedback on the annotated resources provided below regarding, “teaching kids math through computer programming”, the WolframAlpha demo, and the Mathematica Demo.
1. First watch Conrad Wolfram’s TED Talk: From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his progressive idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.
2. Next, watch the Mathematica for Primary and Secondary Education and then it would be interesting to set up a Live Technical Demo of Wolfram Mathematica to get a firsthand feel how Mathematica’s computational, and visual systems can help our students understand the principals of mathematics. Wolfram has also a growing Educational Portal that has a large collection of resources from K-12, and an exciting Demonstration Projects page where new mathematical demonstrations are posted daily using Mathematica’s engine.
3. A must watch is the Introduction to WolframAlpha: This short video will show you the computational power of WolframAlpha which is a FREE knowledge engine available to the world. An engine like this empowers our students to focus more on, posing clear mathematical questions, designing real world math formulation and verification, and less on tedious computation. If you thought Part I was exciting you will definitely enjoy Part II.
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