The Case Against Computers in K-13 Math Education (1996)

I've long held that, if we want computers in the classroom at all, we should steer well clear of any modern gee-whiz gadgets. A modern Commodore 64 clone would teach vastly more about computers than an iPad and would cost maybe $50 total. Modern computers are designed so people don't have to understand them, which is exactly backwards for a student.

> We already saw an extreme example of misallocated resources in Peru. But even in a ``wealthy'' country one has to be concerned about this problem. Many educators in North America share the feeling of betrayal of the teacher who said, They can give us the axe, but they can spend thousands on computers. We have to fire our music coordinator, we have to fire our music teachers, we have shitty libraries. (Lynn, a Canadian schoolteacher, quoted in [14, p. 41])

I’ve seen this happen in the relatively wealthy schools my kids are in. They spend many thousands on smartboards and iPads, and they’ve gotten rid of the “non-essential” arts and music teachers. Parents are personally funding some arts educators on a part time basis a couple of days a week. I think it’s an egregious misuse of funds, wasteful and ultimately damaging to the kids.

What’s worse, the tech is not being used effectively. The teachers don’t have enough training to incorporate the smartboards and iPads, and they don’t have the budget for tech training because they spent it on the iPads. Kids play games on them that they have access to at home, but they’re not being taught about the technology or being taught to use it to do things they can’t do on paper.

I don’t mind computers in the classroom, as long as the arts are funded and the teachers are paid enough. What I’d really love to see more of is using computers to integrate math and arts together... digital arts with an emphasis on both rigorous math and rigorous art. Give the mathy students some aesthetics training, and make sure the art students are capable with computation.

Honestly the computers kids should have are the most barebones python and assembly beige boxes that can be found, and told they can play games when they can make them.

That's why I learned to code.

And beige boxes are WAY cheaper than Apple products (and make you do more with less)

I don't know about general purpose computers, but my life would be completely different if my high school hadn't required the use of computers that masqueraded as calculators.

My school required us to use either a TI-81 or TI-85 and my friends and I quickly discovered the power of TI-Basic. We started with small games to amuse ourselves, since this was an era before mobile phones. But I quickly realized that I could write programs to solve the kinds of problems I expected to see on my math tests. And I was amazed when I asked my teachers whether I was allowed to do that and they said yes...it felt like cheating. Suddenly studying became an altogether different experience where cramming and hoping I'd learned enough was replaced by writing small scripts that gave me full confidence I'd ace the tests. It was so much more efficient. The funny part was, I never actually used my programs during the tests...the act of programming, I realized, forced me to understand the material in a way that cramming never did.

From that experience, and a Doom-like game I built on my calculator, that spurred me to take a computer programming class the summer before college and eventually major in CS and go into tech. And none of that would have happened if my math teachers hadn't been so open minded about allowing us to use what was essentially a computer in class and on tests. So I hope they're not advocating removing all computers from class, because I'd be sad if the path I took into tech was closed to today's students.