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About 15 years ago, I heard a math education professor give a talk about how computer algebra systems would change the kinds of questions teachers would ask high school and first year college students. Exercises in factoring and polynomial long division would become de-emphasized just as those asking students to extract square roots by hand to the third decimal place were deemphasized after calculators became widespread. New types of questions exploring patterns would be possible.

The need for remote teaching and assessment rising this past year has renewed my interest in this topic. Many instructors have had to make all their assessments open-book, open-internet.

So my question has two parts. One is about a curriculum, particularly at the precalculus level: Is there a curriculum that emphasizes topics and skills that CAS would not render "irrelevant" (for lack of a better term) and that utilizes CAS to enrich understanding? The other part is about assessments/problem sets: is a there a body of wolfram alpha-proof questions out there for assessing students?

Edit: I regret implying that factoring will be irrelevant with CAS. In that particular case, I am looking for questions that would build or assess this skill even if the student answering the questions has access to CAS -perhaps something like this Open Middle problem.

Noah
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    I think "utilizing CAS to enrich understanding" is a great direction to go, but I'm skeptical about trying to focus on "skills that CAS would not render irrelevant". There are plenty of valuable mathematical intuitions to be gained from skills that CAS do render irrelevant. Also, specific "how to use a calculator to solve this kind of problem" skills may be rendered obsolete with new technology. – TomKern May 18 '21 at 01:17
  • By chance, was the talk by Conrad Wolfram? [This one was about 11 years ago and made something of a splash at the time.] If so, you might be interested in reading about the Computer Based Math movement. – Nick C May 18 '21 at 01:22
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    Actually, I see on computerbasedmath.org that..."Our mission is to reconceptualise the mainstream mathematics curriculum by assuming computers exist" – Nick C May 18 '21 at 01:48
  • In the US, there is essentially nothing in the K-12 curriculum for which a competent person would bother using a CAS. Less time should be spent on certain random topics like factoring polynomials, but that's not because it should be done with a CAS, it's simply because it's not very useful. What needs reform isn't K-12 math, it's second-semester calculus. –  May 18 '21 at 03:07
  • The talk was at Exeter's Anja Greer Conference in 2009. I guess my 15 year estimate was off. The speaker (not Wolfram) gave a history of how US high school math became organized as a path toward calculus and spoke about TI graphing calculators a little – Noah May 18 '21 at 03:20
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    Possibly relevant is this 12 June 2006 sci.math post (and follow-up post), which discusses a talk I gave in November 1998 (11th ICTCM Conference). A useful search term for what @TomKern brings up in the second sentence of his comment is "scaffolding", an education-specific term I don't think I was aware of when I was thinking about these things back then. – Dave L Renfro May 18 '21 at 17:48
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    The example I go to is how my students are so used to performing calculations involving fractions with their calculators that they don't have those skills memorized when working with fractions in College Algebra. Admittedly, this is something that can also be done with calculators, but the real lesson -- that algebraic formulas can be manipulated the same way numbers can be -- is something calculators don't currently communicate as well as I would like. – TomKern May 18 '21 at 19:09
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    If the goal of mathematics instruction is for students to understand the calculations rather than just do them then the concept that a calculator removes the need for teaching is likewise removed. – James S. Cook May 20 '21 at 20:40
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    The answer to the related question How to teach if calculations and algebraic manipulations are off limits https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/q/20902/15671 links to a UMich source which contains a number of calculator proof questions https://dhsp.math.lsa.umich.edu/examshops.html – TomKern May 22 '21 at 15:36
  • There's actually a great set of college math courses from UIUC called NetMath (https://netmath.illinois.edu/), which are completed entirely within Mathematica. – Nisala Jun 03 '21 at 15:31
  • @Nisala if you could expand on that comment and tell more about the course it might be a very useful answer here. – James S. Cook Jun 06 '21 at 00:20

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You could look at https://neilstrickland.github.io/maths_with_maple/. This is a full set of material for a CAS-based course which is mostly calculus but has some precalculus. It was originally taught using Maple, but I have recently added files that do most of the same work using Maxima instead. (Maxima is open source, but Maple is not.) Everything is released under a Creative Commons license. The idea of the course was to deemphasise routine calculation and use CAS to enhance understanding; you can judge for yourself how well I succeeded.

Neil Strickland
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Some brief resources-

ComputerBasedMath.org

https://www.wolfram.com/education/

https://www.wolfram.com/books/?source=nav

In particular, https://www.wolfram.com/books/profile.cgi?id=9764

Is there a calculator centered secondary school curriculum somewhere?

nickalh
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