Teaching Children to be Mathematicians vs. Teaching About Mathematics. Artificial Intelligence Memo Number 249.

Children will become more proficient in mathematics if they do mathematics rather than merely learn about mathematics. Once educators overcome the misconception that the average student can't do math, they can develop new mathematical activities for children, such as those invented by the staff of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These use computational mathematics projects (in which, for example, a computer regulates the movement of a toy) as vehicles for teaching transferable concepts. They force teachers and students to identify concepts which enable the math beginners to discuss clearly their thinking, they foster personal involvement in mathematics and they encourage children to make creative discoveries. These processes also lead to an understanding of the concepts of debugging, formalization, side-effects and simplification. In short, computational math is superior to the traditional method of teaching math because it teaches children to mathematize, because it develops heuristic concepts, and because it attends to the mathematical primitives. (PB)