#Writing wolfram player modules software#

That seems to be one of the key questions, how do you get buy-in from the teachers and policy makers? People have managed to come out of their boxes of what theyвЂ™re doing, and say, вЂњYeah, IвЂ™ve been doing this for twenty years, but I can see thereвЂ™s a problem.вЂќ I think thatвЂ™s great, when we can encourage people to think outside like that, but not everyone can do that. The reaction to my talk has been very positive, perhaps more so than I expected. On the other hand, itвЂ™s tricky to see what one would do differently if youвЂ™ve been teaching inside the curriculum that we currently force everyone to do. Obviously I donвЂ™t know some of the practicalities if youвЂ™re a teacher every day. You had no previous education background, right?

So, I canвЂ™t really point to an individual time, itвЂ™s been growing over a long period and observing whatвЂ™s happened, and seeing these discrepancies build up between education whatвЂ™s happened outside education. Now, it seems so obviously discrepant with what one needs to do. People didnвЂ™t have computers everywhere and it was hard to see how one could practically put that in. What is it that theyвЂ™re teaching? Is it really the best thing that we can be teaching under the circumstances? And ten or fifteen years ago I was asking these questions, but realistically although a lot of the underlying technology was there, the interaction with it wasnвЂ™t, and it wasnвЂ™t ubiquitous. One place IвЂ™ve seen this applied, or really not applied, is in math teaching.

#Writing wolfram player modules software#

WeвЂ™ve been building software for 20+ years, software to do computations. How did you get interested in reforming math education? We caught up with him in his office near Oxford, England to talk about education reform and the importance of creativity in technical fields. HeвЂ™s now launched a website to collect ideas, and in November he will be hosting The Computer Based Math Education Summit to kick-start the project. In his talk at TEDGlobal 2010, Conrad Wolfram championed a radical new way of teaching mathematics: removing the notion that math is the same as calculating, and completely redesigning the curriculum around the new possibilities opened by computers.