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Estonian Schools To Teach Computer-Based Math
First time accepted submitter Ben Rooney writes "Children in the Baltic state of Estonia will learn statistics based less on computation and doing math by hand and more on framing and interpreting problems, and thinking about validation and strategy. From the article: 'Jon McLoone is Content Director for computerbasedmath.org, a project to redefine school math education assuming the use of computers. The company announced a deal Monday with the Estonian Education ministry to trial a self-contained statistics program replacing the more traditional curriculum. “We are re-thinking computer education with the assumption that computers are the tools for computation,” said Mr. McLoone. “Schools are still focused on teaching hand calculating. Computation used to be the bottleneck. The hard part was solving the equations, so that was the skill you had to teach. These days that is the bit that computers can do. What computers can’t do is set up the problem, interpret the problem, think about validation and strategy. That is what we should be teaching and spending less time teaching children to be poor computers rather than good mathematicians.”'"
The US has been focused more on mathematics for as long as I can remember. That's one reason why the US is usually behind China in terms of math, China places a ton of value on turning children into calculators rather than understanding any of the math they're being expected to rote memorize.
I'm not so sure that going the computer route is such a great idea. It's all well and good to use computers and calculators, but if you don't know your times tables and you can't do long division, you're going to be stuck having to have a calculator at all times. Which is more reasonable now than it used to be, but you'd be surprised how much faster it can be to do things on paper sometimes.
Oh, and good luck getting a calculator to tell you what went wrong when a number you get isn't right.
Especially since it's sepcifically statistics that's involved in the push.
Back in the last half of the 1960s hand calculators were just becoming available and affordable. There was a bunch of pressure to ban them and maintain the old curricula, with hand computation everywhere.
The big mover to calculators was the statistics department. That's because the arithmetic involved in statistics calculations is long and tedius. Assignments could only be toys. Computing a chi-square test using pencils and paper was a group term project. So the students had to eat a semester of theory and have hands-on experience of doing the work ONCE.
With hand calculators a chi-square on a reasonably-sized dataset could be done for a daily assignment. The students could move on from crunching and actually SEE the tools work, getting a "feel" for the processes. That, in turn, meant they could learn MORE tools in the same time.
With computers the computation can be faster than the delay can be perceived, so students can apply another factor-of-many multiplier to how much of the subject they can cover and how well they can comprehend it.
There are some subjects where the number of computations small enough that manual arithmetic is occasionally useful at a professional level, complex enough that understanding all the steps to set it up is important, and powerful enough that a small number of complex computations does something important - rather than bogging you down in an impossibly large number of simple, repetitive, and error-prone steps. Statistics is NOT one of these subjects.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Oh, and good luck getting a calculator to tell you what went wrong when a number you get isn't right.
This.
When I was in graduate school I was TA for a chem lab. For one of the quizzes, a student said he'd forgotten his calculator and asked to borrow mine.
His: TI.
Mine: HP.
Grading him extra points off when he came back with the answer "1.000" for a concentration problem: Priceless.
He knew how to operate his calculator, probably. He didn't know how to operate mine ( "number enter number enter divide" is different than "number enter number divide"). And he demonstrated a complete lack of feeling for the concentration of hydrogen ions in a solution. Unfortunately, it was the latter that he was supposed to learn in this class, not the former. By going with the answer 1.0 "because the calculator said so", he screwed himself and showed a failure to grasp the course material. Had he not been dependent on the calculator, he could have realized that "1.0" is a really really really strong acid, and the buffer he was calculating would never be that strong. The correct answer was five orders of magnitude away, at least.
The sad part of today's "find a calculator" climate is that people have lost the ability to ballpark anything.