[yarian]

I saw Conrad's talk a few months ago and I couldn't agree more. In fact I am attempting to put his theory in general by teaching math through programming at the moment.

I wanted to add a caveat to your confidence point though. We need to engender the right kind of confidence. A lot of kids are already confident, even arrogant. Yet it's completely unfounded since they are not actually acquiring human capital.

We need to promote the kind of confidence that comes from taking a hard problem, banging your head against it for a week, solving it, and repeating. The kind of confidence that comes from previous hard work.

[Lost_BiomedE]

Agreed. The current confidence you speak of is smoke and mirrors, the arrogance hits a brick wall and turns to depression.

In regards to math through programming, I always wondered how well it would work to have a supervised lab that students could use to write up a program verified as their own. Then, allow the student to use this in coursework. The geeks currently do it behind the scenes with their TI calculators anyway. Of course, increasing complexity of coursework would require them to revisit or rewrite their programs.

[yarian]

I don't teach math the way you are thinking about it though. What I mean by math is more like the way of thinking and not specific math concepts.

I mean they learn boolean logic but really it is more of gaining comfort with defining and working with functions, domain, range, and variables.