Believe it or not, math is changing. Or at least the way we use math in the context of our daily lives is changing. The way you learned math will not prepare your children with the mathematical skills they need in the 21st Century.
Don’t take my word for it. I am not a math professor. I almost failed out of calculus in high school. I do not claim to be an expert. I write about video games, psychology, education, and philosophy. I understand the importance of math, but it is not my area of expertise.
When I am writing about math education and I need a true expert opinion, I reach out to Keith Devlin. He is co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University’s Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute. He is also a learning game and app developer who founded a company calledBrainQuake (a part of the Co.lab/Zynga.org edtech accelerator). And, of course, he is well known as the “NPR Math Guy.”
About a month ago, I interviewed Devlin for my MindShiftKQED series on game-based learning. The enlightening conversation changed the way I think about math education. Unfortunately, I only had space there to share some of that conversation. Here, I offer some of the other gems.
I have distilled Devlin’s thoughts down to five key points that I think everyone needs to know about the future of Mathematics.
1. Math education is stuck in the 19th Century
Jordan Shapiro: You wrote a book called Mathematics Education For A New Era: Video Games As A Medium For Learning. You and I have talked a lot about video games in the past, so I’ll let that rest for now. What is this “New Era” and why do we need a different kind of mathematics education?
Keith Devlin: To most people, mathematics means applying standard techniques to solve well defined problems with unique right answers. They have good reason to think that. Until the end of the 19th Century, that’s exactly what it did mean! But with the rise of the modern science and technology era, the need for mathematics started to change. By and large, most people outside mathematics did not experience the change until the rapid growth of the digital age in the last twenty years. With cheap, ubiquitous computing devices that can do all of the procedural mathematics faster and more accurate than any human, no one who wants – or wants to keep – a good job can now ignore that shift from the old “application of known procedures” to new emphasis on creative problem solving.
Read the full story in Forbes.
Keith Devlin is the executive director of the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford.
Read more about Keith Devlin's Introduction to Mathematical Thinking MOOC.
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