Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


Using Technology to Reinvent Math Education

June 20th, 2011 / in Research News / by Erwin Gianchandani

An example of one of the Kill Math visualizations [image courtesy Bret Victor/Kill Math].What subject do high school students dislike the most? My bet is math — it’s confusing, abstract, and requires meticulous attention to detail. But at it’s heart, math is an exciting tool to grapple with otherwise unsolvable problems and ideas. The first time someone explained integrals to me, I couldn’t help but be amazed.

Bret Victor is a self-described Technology Hobo (seriously, that’s what he calls himself) who wants to change the way we interact with math. His project, Kill Math, seeks to change the way students see math by incorporating new technology to transform the abstract, like equations, into corporeal, intuitive and interactive visualizations.

Bret sees technology as the ultimate tool to break math out of pen and paper abstract visualization into real time, easily visualized playthings. As an example, check out an interactive exploration of a dynamical system that he’s created:

(Contributed by Max Cho, Eben Tisdale Fellow, CRA)

Using Technology to Reinvent Math Education

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