Wednesday’s Big Idea
Deep Learning
A fundamental aspect of deep learning is the ability to apply skills to the real world. There is deep risk, therefore, in teaching subjects like math without demonstrating its relevancy to our own world.
Tom Hartsfield demonstrates in today's lesson that basic geometry is used "in almost every engineering project and every physics discovery that has ever been made." If we consider the related idea put forward by thinkers such as Conrad Wolfram that our economy is transitioning into a "computational knowledge economy," then math skills no longer seem abstract, but deeply relevant to a student's chance of success in life.
In such an advanced economy, Wolfram argues, "high-level math is integral to what everyone does." Still more profoundly, experimental research suggests that "our experience of beauty relates most strongly to mathematical language." Now it's time to put the beauty back in the teaching of math.
