I’ve been interested in education for a long time, and when someone suggests that the software system I’ve been working on for 20 years is bad for education, I take it personally.
So I was upset when a
New Scientist magazine article
“Physics Tool Makes Students Miss the Point,” reported on a study by Thomas Bing and Edward Redish,
“Symbolic Manipulators Affect Mathematical Mindsets,” strongly implying that the study concluded that replacing paper-and-pencil calculations with
Mathematica was educationally unsound.
And I was greatly relieved to find that the study itself says no such thing. Bing and Redish don’t recommend banishing Mathematica; they welcome it in their classrooms and point out many positive things about it, along with one relatively minor pitfall they suggest ways to work around.
What mindset led the reporter to jump to such a reactionary conclusion? Why use such an inflammatory headline in connection with level-headed research that showed, when you get right down to it, virtually the opposite of what the
New Scientist headline says?
The question of what technology to use in the classroom comes up all the time, and the resulting debate often generates more heat than light. People feel strongly about the subject because at its heart it is a question about what it means to be human.