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Friday math movie: Conrad Wolfram on Teaching kids real math with computers

By Murray Bourne, 04 Mar 2011

I agree with most of what Conrad Wolfram says in this video.

School mathematics is too mechanical and too much time is spent on calculation. Now that computers are so pervasive, we should spend more time on understanding and application and less on tedious drill and kill.

Conrad Wolfram with his brother Stephen founded Wolfram Research and produced the Mathematica computer algebra system and Wolfram|Alpha, the brilliant "computational search engine".

So let's see Wolfram's answer to "Why are we teaching math?".

Of course, we still need to do some calculation on paper to get a sense of what math software is doing for us.

What are your thoughts on this (espcially if you are a student)?

See the 6 Comments below.

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