Announcement: Our First CBM Country
I'm very excited to announce that computerbasedmath.org has found the first country ready for our completely new kind of math education: it's Estonia. (...and here’s the press release).
I thought Estonia could be first. They are very active on using technology (first to publish cabinet decisions immediately online, first to include programming in their mainstream curriculum), have ambition to improve their (already well respected) STEM aptitude and lack the dogma and resistance to change of many larger countries. There aren't so many countries with all those characteristics.
In our first Estonia project we will work with them to rewrite key years of school probability and statistics from scratch. This is an area that's just crazy to do without a computer, even harmful. It's an area that's only come to the fore since computers because it only makes sense with lots of data. No-one in real life does these hand analyses or works with only 5 data points, so why do we make our students? Why get students emulating what computers do so much better (computing) rather than concentrate on imaginative thinking, analysis and problem-solving that students ought to be able to do so much better even than today's computers?