Students' math scores jumped 20% with iPad textbooks, publisher says

[Pholus]

19. Tell me about it. Tech is cool, but there is a point in learning where it should not be allowed...

As a member of the first scientific calculator generation (not graphing, not symbolic manipulations) I had my slide rule elders talk about all the intuition I lost because the calculator did so much for me. I believe they were right now, 30 years on. Having to
include errorbars on every calculation gave you a very fine intuition for how firmly a particular result could be trusted and how to do complicated calculations in a certain order to get at the most important answers first before rounding error set in.

A particular memory sticks out crystal clear every time I hear some technical device billed as being some kind of miracle device that makes learning the hard sciences and math easy...

When I was in college the first symbolic algebra calculators were coming out. A dear friend took the "alternative calculus" where the calculator was used to "reduce the drudgery of computation and allow deeper exploration of the concepts" where I, being of lesser potential according to the placement tests, suffered through the traditional college calculus class.

A year later we were in physics together and had a problem that after a lot of manipulation reduced to having to find the roots of:

x^2 -5x +6 = 0 (or something just like that, of course I don't remember the exact equation but it WAS a simple binomial).

It's just algebra. The same kind of algebra that was used in the placement test in the first place. She BLEW ME AWAY on that test by multiple sigmas I remember.

But here we were facing this problem.

Me? Okay what two numbers multiply to +6 but add to -5. Oh, okay we are talking about -3 and -2 so the factors are x-3 and x-2 and so the roots are 2 and 3. You could just SEE that looking at the binomial. Heck it was easy compared to the ones we'd been drilled in calc III during series.

My friend? Reached for her calculator. I couldn't believe it and asked her to just try to do it without the calculator (basically because I had the answers and didn't want to wait -- youth is impatient at times).

She could NOT do it. A year after being very adept. She said she just couldn't remember how. Within that same year she was out of a STEM major. Despite the high potential. The only difference in our backgrounds was in our math preparation. I think she'd have made a damn fine engineer or scientist but the math preparation ruined her.

In the end, I cannot even see how she could possibly have gained any more intuition that I did about the concepts behind the math, since a VERY simple binomial's roots escaped her. How could she have understood what that root even meant? After all, my "in your head" technique forced me to face what the definition of a root was -- a zero in the factors of the binomial. Kind of like my engineers and cross products. How can you really know geometrically what it is if you don't understand how to manually manipulate the vectors even using the determinant trick?

So pardon me for being VERY skeptical that tech makes learning a hard science or math any easier. It might "help you through" or "make the homework easier" but at what cost? I think in the same fashion where I could say I can bench 320 if my spotter lifts 160 of it for me. I've done the problem, though not necessarily by developing the prerequisites that are the benefit I was actually seeking. It means that I will probably not be able to lift 330 if my spotter isn't doing 165 of it...

So this made me a luddite at age 21. Despite being a techie. Sometimes it MUST COME DOWN to you and a pencil and paper and the clarity of your thoughts. So a single industry backed study does not convince me a bit.