Dive Brief:
- The Association of Computation and Mathematical Modeling, a nonprofit founded two years ago by students in California’s Cupertino High School, is developing a free mathematical modeling curriculum.
- District Administration reports founder and director Yankai Zhang, a current student at UC-Santa Barbara, advocates a shift from asking high schoolers to solve equations to asking them to create them, and he says that as a recent high schooler himself, he knows what will interest a student audience.
- The curriculum will be ready in early 2017, emphasizing the use of equations to solve real-world problems in engineering, science and computing, like the ones the association asks students to solve in an annual mathematical modeling competition.
Dive Insight:
Zhang is not the first to identify a shortcoming in U.S. math education. Others have criticized the focus on calculus, saying most students would do better in life and in their future careers with a more comprehensive background in statistics. Andrew Hacker, author of “The Math Myth,” advocates for better numeracy education that will prepare adults to understand budgets and read corporate reports. The type of math most adults need is advanced arithmetic.
Community colleges, especially, have taken this to heart in helping students identify first-year courses. More and more are saying remedial math to prepare for calculus is not the best use of students’ money and time. Zhang’s nonprofit, however, does align with a movement in schools to incorporate real-world problems in lesson plans. This strategy seems to be more engaging for students and offers a source of motivation to create and solve equations.