Your Name and Title:
David Wees, Learning Specialist: Technology
School or Organization Name:
Stratford Hall
Co-Presenter Name(s):
Area of the World from Which You Will Present:
Vancouver, BC
Language in Which You Will Present:
English
Target Audience(s):
Mathematics teachers
Short Session Description (one line):
This session will look at resources related to use of computers in mathematics education.
Full Session Description (as long as you would like):
Mathematics is one of the few areas with which there is much agreement on what it looks like, and how it is useful to us. From a cultural perspective, it forms a common language across the globe. However, in different parts of the world, math is taught slightly differently, with each culture approaching math education from a slightly different framework.
On November 10th and 11th, there is a summit happening in London, which will include people from many different countries, where we will be collaborating to build a new curriculum based on the use of computers to do much of the computation which is currently taught to students, and focus on students understanding how those computations agree. This is a global collaboration to reform mathematics education for the digital age.
Our mathematics curriculum has changed very little in the past 100 years, except for cosmetic re-arrangements. Some very modern mathematics, generally done using computers, has yet to see it's way into the k to 12 curriculum, despite being fascinating, rigorous, and very useful for describing our world. Fractals, chaos theory, and computer programming are all highly interesting (or rather, they can be) topics that are almost not taught in k to 12 schools.
This presentation will talk about how we can include these topics, and others, and how we can restructure some of the k to 12 curriculum to allow for more use of computers to do computations. We will also discuss which mathematics from our existing curriculum is critical to include, and which mathematics can safely be done using computers. We will also look at ways we can collaborate to experiment with math education across the globe, and how the introduction of small portable and extremely inexpensive computers may address some of the inequity of this transformation.
Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:
http://davidwees.com/computerbasedmath
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