First Computer-Based Math Education Summit, November 10-11

[Sol Lederman]

Phil Wagner suggested I let the ECT community know about an upcoming computer-based math education summit (just a month away) that I am helping to organize. Here is the motivation for the summit:

Following the worldwide reaction to Conrad Wolfram's TED talk "Stop teaching calculating; start teaching math" this summit addresses the question - In an era of ubiquitous computing, how should we rebuild maths education from the ground up, to keep pace with and drive progress in the real world?

There's a real momentum for math education reform; Conrad Wolfram founded computerbasedmath.org to address the growing chasm between math in education and math outside, between the increasingly irrelevant school math curriculum that contrasts with the critical and growing importance of math and its uses in the real world. Many concerned parties have observed how many of those involved in school math fail to appreciate the total transformation and fundamental change that computers have brought to this ancient subject in recent decades. The Computer-Based Math summit will catalyze much needed and long overdue changes.

The summit is in London, November 10 and 11.

Details are at the summit site:

http://computerbasedmath.org/events/londonsummit2011/details.html

A tentative schedule is posted here:

http://computerbasedmath.org/events/londonsummit2011/schedule.html

Notable speakers will include:

Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford

Ralph Lucas, UK House of Lords

Paul Wilmott, Founder of Wilmott Magazine

Gary Bitter, Past president of ISTE

Caroline Meeks, Past project manager for "Sugar on a Stick"

Charles Fadel, Founder of Center for Curriculum Redesign

Hylke Koers, Content Innovation Manager for Elsevier

Maria Droujkova, Director of Natural Math

Scott Gray, O'Reilly Media – Director of Make: Mathematics

Joerg Sixt, Publishing Editor, Mathematics for Springer-Verlag London

I welcome your questions, comments, and suggestions about the summit or about computerbasedmath.org.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would spread the word to others who might benefit from this information.

Sincerely,

Sol Lederman for computerbasedmath.org

sol at wolfram dot com

[paul...@gmail.com]

I'll be there ... .

[paul...@gmail.com]

I would like to see someone at the conference that would takle the question that I always hear from my students: " When am I ever going to use this? ".

[Phil Wagner]

I'd love to hear more responses to that. I wrote on my personal blog
why students should know how to program but it applies to
Computational Thinking as well:

http://www.brokenairplane.com/2011/03/programming-literacy-math-science.html