Is programming the new math?

Physical education is the new math. Students don't like to be trapped in stuffy classrooms. They want to be outside and run around in the fresh air and sunshine. Over the semester, not only have my students improved markedly in physical fitness, but they've learned critical problem solving skills. We're playing football. They've developed increasingly sophisticated plays, analyzed defenses and developed counter-strategies. They fluidly execute novel strategies informed by planning and an awareness of the evolving whole-field situation. Clearly, PE is the new math.<p>WTF? Math has specific content and method. A proof is not a program. A for loop is not an integral. Your vaguely technical subject is not a substitute for math just because your students seem more engaged. Teaching people to think logically isn't the point of math, any more than it is the point of history, biology, literature or, yes, even programming. If your students have fuzzy feeling when problem solving, they probably have fuzzy ideas about math. They haven't been taught clearly. If they're uncomfortable with reasoning in math, they haven't been forced to develop intellectual independence. And foisting of "check the steps" on a computer won't help. And don't get me started on how naive an ideas of correctness that is.

I had a rather bruising experience last fall "teaching" precalculus to a lecture of 180 students. Although I'd try to engage the students and explain how the stuff is useful, the students would have none of it. I got scathing reviews about how I was teaching stuff that wouldn't be useful until calculus 2 (which is, of course, a feature and not a bug).<p>We're fundamentally talking about 18-year-olds with bad attitudes here. If we can engage them with programming as opposed to further disengage them with math, I'm all for it. Anything that hastens the realization that learning is your own responsibility would pay great dividends to the students.

A common gripe from young students when learning math is "I'm never going to use this!"<p>With programming, it's much easier to motivate the subject matter - students <i>want</i> to learn the math so they can improve their projects.<p>Similarly, I found linear algebra and linear programming much more interesting when I was studying economics, and classical physics much more fun when writing little javascript animations.<p>So maybe applied math is a better approach at the intro levels. I'm just not sure how we get there from existing math-centric teachers and curricula.

The problem with "I'm never going to use it" is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Further down the line, this attitude excludes you from jobs and opportunities where you need to be able to use it.<p>I say teach math (up to algebra and basic trig and calculus) and programming in every high school. Dropping out is so much easier than dropping in at a later age.

Some subjects just cannot be taught from authority. The problem with math education, as I see it, is that primary and secondary school math teachers really can't answer too many 'why' questions (for a variety of reasons such as lack of knowledge or lack of time).<p>Teaching math from a programming perspective (or vice versa) should work since you must (as opposed to 'shall') model problems you care about in terms of math.

Iterative programming is the new arithmetic, Functional programming is the new math.

I had a short stint as a research assistant for a prof who's using programming to teach high school seniors and entering freshmen math skills [1]. I'd have to ask him how the research is going now, but the preliminary results were encouraging.<p>[1]: <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/computationalsystems/" rel="nofollow">http://sites.google.com/site/computationalsystems/</a>

As much as the discussion has focused on defending mathematics and the importance of teaching it, that's not to discount the value in teaching kids about coding. Whether or not they later become hackers, they'll have an appreciation for how things work and an interest in doing rather than simply watching.

I always found math to be problematic because it builds on itself, yet math classes vary so much by school and teacher. I ran into difficulty in a graduate level course simply because I had never once been shown algebra with inequalities.<p>Also, you don't get instant, positive feedback, and immediate indication of whether your solution is correct as you do when programming.