Bet On Computer-based Math For More Creativity in the Future
My math education experience, as represented by the above image, was probably similar to that of many readers. First, I was introduced to the scientific calculator in junior high, before moving on to the graphing calculator in high school. Where my math education might diverge is in returning to the subject later as an adult for professional reasons, and learning to code in Mathematica, which is nothing less than a blank page wired directly into a supercomputer and then onto the Internet! It’s a full-on data science workhorse in the unassuming guise of a notebook page.
The benefits of this technology have implications for all society as concerns over digital literacy grow. Now is the perfect time to revisit the appropriateness of implementing a computer-based math program in grades K-12. I imagine a time when students graduating from high school have the digital tools to tap into the ever increasing amount of data flowing around them. Whether it’s trivial things like programming color-changing LED lights on a Halloween costume or creating an app for the local maker faire, to more serious subject matter like thinking critically about the statistics they read online or calculating for themselves the energy involved in ocean warming, we as adults have a responsibility to at least offer them the tools to make their own choices, own mistakes, and own creations within the changing digital landscape.
I realized as I was preparing this piece that the arguments I use to support a wider adoption of computer-based math rest on two assumptions; educated, observable assumptions, but assumptions nonetheless. I can’t guarantee them to be universal laws like gravity, but I do think they are a solid basis for my views.
I feel like I’m on pretty solid ground when I claim the economy is changing toward a digital future. If readers are looking for a more rigorous description of the shift, I would point them toward two books by MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfree: The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2016) and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (2017). My piece here rests on the implications of the shift described in those books. We can’t reverse it, but we can engage it to even higher levels of productivity and creativity.
The second assumption is that as the saturation of programmers and coders within a region increases, it will feed into economic and cultural prosperity of that area. The mechanic for this is roughly analogous to the effects of historically increasing literacy rates, which brought a great flourishing of culture and communication to areas which supported the new skill of reading and adopted technology for the printed word. It’s expected that as the number of coders grow in any number of programming languages, communities can enter into a positive feedback cycle, and reinvest those profits back into society at large.
Professions are changing with the shifts in technology. Librarians are teaching 3D printing workshops; doctors are finding patterns in their patient’s big data; non-profits are communicating more quickly with each other and their target demographics; sports teams are refining their strategies; and smaller businesses are able to intelligently leverage the data they generate. The news is full of these changes where professionals are becoming more effective at achieving their goals by being more digitally literate.
This is certainly true of my profession of architecture or, more exactly, the architecture, engineering, construction and owner/operator industry (AECO industry). Many in the industry see massive change on the horizon. Buildings are expected to have integrated sensor networks. Contractors see benefits of additive construction techniques on site. Building performance analysis is an important step toward ensuring the proposed structure is cost-effective, and generative design holds great potential to raise the quality of building design. Just the ease of collaborating with all the stakeholders listed above using a digital workbench is not something previous design eras had the advantage of. There is also a more abstract point to be made: as the amount of data which a design project is expected to integrate increases, the natural way to interact with the complex multi-dimensional structure is through computation — not graphically, by hand, through a mouse.
Now we arrive at the step where the AECO industry trips up. None of us know what the heck we’re doing with the technology. We love architecture and we love building, but we’re not robotics engineers, data scientists, or software developers. This means we struggle with problems these fields have already wrestled with and tamed. We especially struggle with the question, which comes in many forms, of whether such-and-such a problem is a good candidate for a solution through computation given the resources of a project. All the expertise to answer these questions effectively lie in the fields listed above.
To put our industry’s struggles into slightly more human terms, I am writing this after a Calgary Dynamo Users Group meet-up. On a cold fall evening, a small group of enthusiasts gathered from all corners of the AECO Industry to learn a bit more from each other about the open-source coding language of Dynamo, which connects into all manner of Autodesk products.
I found the topic of the evening absolutely fascinating: a direct comparison on the same production tasks between Dynamo’s visual code-block based interface, and the more industrial-strength C#, a programming language more closely aligned with the language in which Autodesk’s REVIT was natively coded. It was a really interesting comparison, but being familiar with Mathematica’s easy learning curve that scales well to advanced users, I definitely gave the edge to the more approachable Dynamo. This is because I think it’s important to encourage wide and quick adoption now, trusting that, like the rise of literacy rates, creativity and communication will follow even with its most basic application, leaving more advanced use cases to inevitably emerge over time.
None of us attending the meet-up recognized ourselves as software developers, meaning projects develop with a certain amount of risk attached that a more sophisticated approach provided by a background in software development project management could mitigate. However, I have always appreciated the architecture and engineering fields’ determination to get stuff done. That positive creative attitude was certainly on display at the meet-up, as each person shared and supported each other through the learning process. No self-respecting designer looks at a dirt plot and waits for the building to appear. One must take initiative from day one to design it and, if necessary, learn the tools themselves to complete it.
The AECO Industry can’t stay ignorant of developments in digital design forever. The stakes are high. Our buildings have to get better, be more cost-effective, and sustainable. As millennials continue to enter the workforce with already established programming skills, they will find ways to combine and streamline data we haven’t even considered yet. I wonder how much more insight we would have had into the problems posed at the user group if we all had years of computer-based math as our programming foundation. Perhaps whole new forms of architecture are waiting to be discovered; buildings so efficient they effectively put power back on the grid.
Therefore, when one calls for an increase in resources for computer-based math, what one is hoping to do is make the ground fertile for positive change. No farmer seeks to direct the growth of every stalk, but rather works to make the field as a whole healthy in an effort to ensure a bountiful harvest.
Certainly it’s possible to hold other educational priorities above computer-based math. Education is a complex subject, and it would indeed seem strange if there weren’t other perspectives on the issue. But the economic and cultural shift toward computation will continue regardless of whether education keeps up or not. And certainly I find it more inviting to move a large ship with the current, than paddle even a small kayak against it.
Perhaps already finding success with writing and drawing, carried out on blank paper, has made me more open to seeing the endless creative possibilities offered by a new Mathematica notebook. Certainly I recognize other people, both adults and children, can be intimidated when put in front of a blank page to write or draw on. But I don’t find people’s intimidation of programming so different to approaching a blank page in the other creative arts, or at least the root causes of such hesitation is not directly connected to Mathematica itself. This is what gives me confidence that if teachers are just given the resources, they can certainly engage students of all ages toward computer-based math, leading to the successful outcomes we desire for our children.
Ultimately, I think adults have a responsibility to give students the tools and let them decide what to do with them. Of course, some students might graduate and never code again. But I don’t see this risk as meaning we should do nothing at all. Some students have always rolled their eyes at trigonometry and questioned the usefulness of organic chemistry, but this is not a failure of education. These conditions have existed throughout all times and cultures, from ancient China to ancient Greece, and yet the subjects are still here. If we wait until education is perfect to implement computer-based math, I fear the world will have moved on without us. Not doing anything is the surest way to fail our students.
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About the Author
Blair Birdsell has a background in architectural history and building science and lives in Calgary, Alberta. From his position inside the AECO Industry he has developed an interest in STEM education policy. To learn more about Blair’s writing, please visit his Linkedin profile or his celebration of architecture on Instagram.
