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 radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.
Quite predictably this TED Talk has already generated a lot of comment. Conrad Wolfram confronts the traditionalists and refocuses attention on what’s really important in maths and the potential this unleashes. It’s well worth a watch and raises many significant issues. On a wider note the issues resonate for much of the ‘schooled curriculum’ http://tiny.cc/7y3n0
