THE VIDEO SHELF · math education
Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers
Conrad Wolfram argues that the part of math taught in schools, hand calculation, is tedious and mostly irrelevant to real mathematics. He proposes teaching math through computer programming so students can tackle real problems.
Why HN readers recommended it
Cited in HN discussions of math and CS education reform as an argument that school math is boring because it is taught wrong.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- TED
- Topic
- math education
- Format
- talk
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2012–2020
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
There's a few problems with the article. The rules argument he makes could instead be made for the more useful field of computer programming. Also, the reductionist paradigm is dead. It worked for finding laws of physics and some chemistry, but otherwise, in the most …
marshallp on Hacker News · 2012-10
In The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics EducationBut isn't maths boring at school because we're teaching it wrong? See Conrad Wolfram's TED Talk: [VIDEO]
kranzky on Hacker News · 2013-09
In The Commodore 64 Spike: A Freakonomics-ish Theory of CS Education
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.