Computational Knowledge February 4, 2014

Right now we have a serious need for more students to fall in love with all of the STEM subjects, which fall into the categories of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We know these fields fuel economic growth, so training a STEM workforce has been recognized as a key goal in education policy. And yet, there is an enthusiasm gap in these subject areas, and nowhere is that more evident than math. In the United States, students don’t think they’re good at math, so they become quite adapt at hatting it. Many students it seems would rather eat broccoli than do math homework (and that is within a culture raised on fast-food where the concept of broccoli is viewed as utterly disgusting). Not surprisingly, these students are significantly underperforming. So how do we change this?

The way we teach math needs to be reinvented!

In a nutshell, “students need visual and interactive curriculum that ties into real life.” Nowhere is the power of how good mathematical instruction better demonstrated than within the environment of Wolfram Mathematica.

Properly teaching math breaks math down into four components:

1. Posing the right questions
2. Turning a real world problem into a math formulation
3. Computation
4. Turning a math formulation back to the real world, verifying it.

We spend perhaps 80 percent of the time in math education teaching people to do #3 (computation by hand) — This is the one step that computers can do better than any human after years of practice. Why are we doing this?

Instead, let us use computers to calculate. After all, that’s the math chore we hate the most. It may have been necessary to teach this skill 50 years ago. There are certainly a few practical examples of how hand-calculation can be useful today.

The goal of the Wolfram technology is to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. We see this technology achieving some pretty spectacular levels of performance in Wolfram|Alpha and within Mathematica as well. Integrating this form of computational knowledge within classrooms is going to have a powerful multiplying effect on student performance and understanding as they orient themselves to solving real-life problems with the power of computational knowledge.