symbols – EDUC 342: Child Development & New Technologies https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu Thu, 18 Feb 2016 09:36:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6.1 Week 7 – Thu Ngo https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-7-thu-ngo/ https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-7-thu-ngo/#respond Thu, 18 Feb 2016 09:36:41 +0000 http://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/?p=1514 The Keith Devlin video gave me a totally new perspective on math and symbols. The first is that I’ve always seen math as what Devlin describes as “the representation of math”. The second is that the symbols that we use to use represent math is artificial. This second realization was huge for me. Mathematical symbols have been around for such a long time that you can argue that they’re antiquated. Given that there can be better ways to represent it, why do we not move towards this new, better way?

Devlin proposes that we utilize video games to do so, which I believe is a great step. However, I wonder…in what way can we utilize technology (in the broader sense) to create a new way of representing math? Symbols seem to be a way that we’ve optimized the representation of math for paper. What new medium in the future will be utilized?

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