Support The Right Advanced Mathematics Education, Don't Cut It Off

The UK government has announced cuts to the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme that provides support for promising mathematicians to make them excel. Many in the UK maths and education community are up in arms, arguing that that this will cut off the very AI innovation Prime Minister Keir Starmer says we most need. Is it an ideological "anti-elitist" cut, or a failure to understand the connection between maths and AI? Or are they planning to switch the funding to back a modern, advanced, computer-based maths alternative?

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ChatGPT: The real world is changing. How should education react?

Over the last few days, I’ve been asked how ChatGPT (particularly allied to Wolfram|Alpha) will affect education, how it relates to “computational literacy for all” and the computer-based mathematics education that my book The Math(s) Fix maps out. Actually, Wolfram is involved in Edtech in many other ways too; it will be great seeing how the full range of powerful integrations emerge that can deliver better education.

In this post, I want to zoom out to put this new technology in context hopefully to help to suggest how we might think about changes it should and shouldn’t cause.

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Released today: "The Math(s) Fix"

TMF day has finally arrived. After more than 15 years of conceptualising the idea, 10 years of build-out and 2 years of writing and editing, I have assembled “The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age” or TMF for short and thrown it out to the world today in ink and e-ink.

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COVID-19: Mathematical Modelling on Trial

Mathematical modelling is at the centre of our lives as never before—invoked and presented daily to justify massive change in our way of life, livelihoods—even as giver of life or death.

It’s presented by experts not only as the best torch to pick in navigating us to the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, but the only one. It predicts the future or how we must change policy to achieve a different future.

Conrad Wolfram29 April 2020Coronavirus, COVID-19, Maths, The Math(s) Fix, Computational Thinking, ModellingComment

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Has the math(s) brand become toxic?

For once I'm not talking about the contents of school maths but the name and its associations.

The question I'm asking is if our core technical subject wasn't termed "maths" but "nicebrand" would things go better in and out of education?

Sadly, I've started to conclude the answer is yes. I now suspect that using the brand of maths is damaging core technical education, its reform, and efforts to equip society for the AI age.

Believe me, this is not the conclusion I want. I've spent years of my life somehow connected with the word "maths". But much as I might not like my conclusion, I want the essence of subject maths to succeed; so I don't want the name to kill the subject—a much worse outcome.

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Anchoring Computational Thinking in today’s curriculum

There is a lot of talk of "Computational Thinking" as a new imperative of education, so I wanted to address a few questions that keep coming up about it. What is it? Is it important? How does it relate to today's school subjects? Is Computer-Based Maths (CBM) a Computational Thinking curriculum?

Firstly, I've got to say, I really like the term.

To my mind, the overriding purpose of education is "to enrich life" (yours, your society's, not just in "riches" but in meaning) and different ways in which you can think about how you look at ideas, challenges and opportunities seems crucial to achieving that.

Therefore using a term of the form “xxx Thinking" that cuts across boundaries but can support traditional school subjects (eg. History, English, Maths) and emphasises an approach to thinking is important to improving education.

Conrad Wolfram4 October 2016Computational Thinking, CBM, math, curriculum, PISA, Coding, Assessment Comments

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