Tag Archives: Conrad Wolfram

Stop Teaching Kids To Compute Math!

Do we really believe that the math most students do in school is really more than applying procedures to problems students really d not understand for reasons they don’t get?  Is what they are learning even practical anymore.  Conrad  Wolfram says in math education, we’re spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching students to calculate math.  Yet, that’s the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice. Instead, we ought to be using computers to do the calculating and have the students to spend much more effort on learning how to pose the right questions, apply to real world and verify. Wolfram says important to understand that math does not equal calculating – it is a much broder subject. Watch Conrad’s though provoking Ted Talk!