CMU professor hopes to bring math to the masses [View all]

[yortsed snacilbuper]

if you happen to be staring out the window one morning during third grade, it might wreck the future of your math understanding forever.

“That’s why math is hard,” he said. “Not because it’s hard. Just because there’s a lot of dependencies.”

The solution, he thinks, is to teach math via problem solving techniques, rather than memorization of individual concepts. Say a student can’t remember 8 x 7, for example. If they can determine that 8 x 7 is the same as doubling 4 x 7, they can figure it out that way. If they don’t know 4 x 7, they can go down to 2 x 7. “You can build everything out of 1 + 1, 2 + 2, 10 + 10,” he said. “You see 6 + 6 when you see eggs. You see 5 + 5 when you look at your hands. You can recover it.

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2018/05/07/po-shen-loh-expii-math-olympiad-steeltown-Carnegie-Mellon-University-CMU/stories/201805010004