I recently saw Dan Meyer’s outstanding TED talk and felt compelled to reach out to him for his thoughts about Virtual Nerd. He’s right about textbooks often doing a disservice to students when they teach with algorithms and not through discovery. I myself learned to love math by working on contest problems, which pushed me beyond anything I had been taught in class or “trained” to solve. So I’m keenly interested in the approach Dan featured in his talk.
Dan was kind enough to share a few thoughts about Virtual Nerd with me in an email, and he also reached out to his followers on Twitter for their opinions. There were a lot of interesting comments (thanks, @aschmitz, @rogre, @samjshah, @thevirtuosi, @gnat, @RapidInnovation), and I think a discussion of these comments may shed light on our vision for Virtual Nerd.
A few commenters observed that many Virtual Nerd tutorials cover example problems like those in traditional textbooks, and therefore teach with a “plug and grind”, “cookie cutter”, algorithmic approach.
This criticism is valid, and, as Dan rightly noted, is a case of addressing a need we perceived in the current system. But our broader vision is not limited to “drill and kill”, and we are always looking for people with a different approach to help steer us in the right direction.
For me, math is beautiful because of how interconnected and nonlinear it is. People who know and love math see the many connections, and there is real beauty in how even traditional homework problems connect, both to each other and to deeper mathematical principles. At NCTM in San Diego last week for example, Gary Rubinstein showed some wonderful examples of how usually-dry mathematical lessons, like the angle bisector theorem, can be taught in the context of a mathematical gem, like with Ptolemy’s solution to sin(3°).
I would love for Virtual Nerd to have tutorials about those mathematical gems and use our unique user interface to provide links to the underlying mathematical concepts, making those gems come to life. And on the flip-side, I want students who come to the site for help with a seemingly dry kind of problem to be able to navigate easily to more illuminating problems that rely heavily on the “dry” problem they are working on.
I want Virtual Nerd to go well beyond the typical teaching algorithms. I want Virtual Nerd to help students discover and understand why math works the way it does. As our content library grows, we will be able to allow students not only to drill-down to the deeper principles that support the problem that they are working on, but also to drill-up or across to related concepts so they can further explore the key mathematical ideas their problem can teach.
We know that we have a ways to go before our content can be used for exploration or discovery, but we’re confident that our technology can help us get there. With the right content I think that we can begin to address Lockhart’s Lament, and I hope that people who are sick of an algorithmic approach to math problems will see the value in our technology and be willing to contribute to our efforts.
Many thanks to Dan Meyer for his inspiration and for encouraging productive debate.
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