A project investigating a different way to present math and manipulate mathematical information, leveraging today’s technology.
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
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We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper. The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface.
The site contains an interesting premise — the problems with math instruction aren’t limited to the methodology (a problem pointed out in any number of Vi Hart videos), but also the material itself:
school math is useless, kills inspiration and curiosity, is mind-numbingly tedious, makes no connections to anything, and is forgotten immediately after the test. It’s all negative.
which is also often true of science instruction.
Make sure not to miss
— The animations in the section “A Possibly Embarrassing Personal Anecdote,” which are pretty neat — as visualization of the integral, but also an intriguing visualization of an equation
— The video Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System, which shows a model of a predator-prey system and the ways one can manipulate the equations to visualize how the variables behave.
Swansont, you read my mind. Yesterday I was reading an article about how bad school math sucks, and how ineffective it is.
Don’t know how to post a link in blog comments. Bud read this:
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
We could be teaching ten year olds intuition about limits instead of taking long division out to one more decimal place. Which, even if they become mathematicians, will be done with a calculator.
I for one champion Department of Education-overseen destruction of critical and quantitative thought. Logic, analysis, prediction, and verification are heinous impositions of society upon culture. Consider partriarchal White Protestant European historic oppressors of People of Colour discovering a heretofore isolated continent, wiping it clean of Neolithic indigenes, and introducing literacy (plus its evil servant, books) and latrines.
If you truly wish to bodily rise into heaven on 21 March there must never have been a rational thought within your head – and mere volition is not good enough. Non tamen solam intendit interiorem, immo interior nulla est, nisi foris operetur varias carnis mortificationes. Education is a portal into the divine. Let God re-establish His dominion of poverty, hunger, disease, filth, death, and silk-clad priests with whips.
Management obsesses on what is measurable instead of promoting what is important. Everything is ISO900x right with the world, just like thousands of LHC high amperage busbar braises. How dare they try to end this beauty!