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Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers

TED

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YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Conrad Wolfram, co-founder of Wolfram Research
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

362K views15 years ago2 recommendations

Computer scienceMath for programmersComputation and complexity

Conrad Wolfram argues that math education should focus on conceptual problem-solving using computers rather than tedious hand calculations.

ted.com From rockets to stock markets, math powers many of humanity's most thrilling creations. So why do kids lose interest? 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 radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a thought-provoking argument for reforming mathematics education to focus on programming and computation.

marshallpon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics Education”

…worked for finding laws of physics and some chemistry, but otherwise, in the most useful fields of today, like biology/materials/chemistry (high throughput methods), computer vision, search engines etc. the automated creation of hypotheses through machine learning is winning out. Conrad Wolfram gives a talk about the need for math education reform link to this video He uses the term mathematics, but completely removing that term and replacing it with computer programming and machine learning should be done. They sound cooler and this step will remove all the baggage and ill-will mathematics has in society. That way, all mathematics teachers can be simply removed from high schools and colleges and repla…

kranzkyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Commodore 64 Spike: A Freakonomics-ish Theory of CS Education”

But isn't maths boring at school because we're teaching it wrong? See Conrad Wolfram's TED Talk: link to this video

Zhylon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Wolfram Physics Project”

…, Stephen and Conrad Wolfram are clever men. It is without a doubt that Mathematica is an extraordinary piece of software. Many people here will have benefitted from Wolfram Alpha and will have used Mathematica either in an academic context or in an engineering context. Stephen Wolfram, however, is not Christ, even though he likes to think so. 1 link to this video…