Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge interviews Conrad Wolfram of Wolfram Research about the importance of teaching more real-world applications to math lessons, rather than emphasizing manual calculations.

• With the younger generations being especially adept at computers and technology, it only makes sense to let machines do the heavy lifting, while applying a more creative, innovative approach to STEM learning.

• Here's why igniting students’ STEM interest begins with teacher education.

Has the math brand become toxic? That was the provocative question posed by Conrad Wolfram in a blog post earlier this summer. “Sadly,” he wrote, “I’ve started to conclude that the answer is yes.”

That conclusion may seem startling, especially as Wolfram is the strategic director of Wolfram Research, and one of the brainchild behind Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica, a system widely used in technical fields to process complex computations and calculations. His critique, in a nutshell: math instruction has become too fixated on computation — solving for x, for example — and removed from real-world applications and data.

Today, Wolfram is the founder of Computers-Based Math, an effort that he described as “building a new math curriculum that assumes computers exist.”

Today, computation now gets done fantastically well by computers — better than anyone could ever have imagined 1,500 years ago," he says. "But what we’re doing in education right now is making people learn how to calculate by hand, but not learn how to do problem solving at a high level. They’re learning how to do computation, and not leaving that to the machines. Until we fix that fundamental issue, we’re not going to have the subject of math converging with what we need in the real world."

Read the full article about Conrad Wolfram's views on math in schools by Tony Wan at EdSurge.