I just thought some people would be interested in this article/website I came across. "Kill Math" doesn't look like a project or association so much as a personal project/essay of the site owner's.
The newest article,
Ladder of Abstraction, demonstrates an approach to problem solving, along with an AMAZING way of presenting information. (It's an interactive article)
The example used is a car navigating a road. The example given connects different levels of conceptualization and reasoning.
The broader idea, "
Kill Math" I think is well summed up in the first paragraph of that link:
Quote: "The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
When most people speak of Math, what they have in mind is more its mechanism than its essence. This "Math" consists of assigning meaning to a set of symbols, blindly shuffling around these symbols according to arcane rules, and then interpreting a meaning from the shuffled result. The process is not unlike casting lots.
This mechanism of math evolved for a reason: it was the most efficient means of modeling quantitative systems given the constraints of pencil and paper. Unfortunately, most people are not comfortable with bundling up meaning into abstract symbols and making them dance. Thus, the power of math beyond arithmetic is generally reserved for a clergy of scientists and engineers (many of whom struggle with symbolic abstractions more than they'll actually admit).
We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper. The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface."
I agree with a lot of points in this. For example, I'd say that differential equations aren't really all that hard to understand. Everyone intuitively knows what velocity is, and of course velocity changes over time, so given a velocity at any point in time you can find position. I don't think it would be unreasonable to teach this concept to middle-schoolers! Of course, solving for things explicitly wouldn't be appropriate for a middle school class, and consequences of differentials like trig and exponential growth/decay would be completely unnecessary, but concepts like "oscillation" and "getting smaller" are easy to understand. Besides, in many real-life applications, it's completely impossible to solve explicitly for a value. You can write transcendental functions and make approximations, but in that case all of the trig and exponential rules are useless.
Anyways, it's a great series of articles well-deserving of a read.
