This TED talk by Conrad Wolfram, of Wolfram Research, will really resonate with anyone who follows system dynamics and learner-directed learning.
He asks, “what is math?” and decomposes it into four steps:
- Posing the right questions
- Translating the real world problem into a mathematical formulation
- Map the mathematical answer back to the real world, and verify it
He argues that 80% of conventional education is expended on step 3, which is boring if you do it by itself. Instead, he says, we should use increasingly-ubiquitous computers for step 3, and focus on the fun parts – 1, 2 & 4.
This is basically a generalization of the modeling process and the SD approach to education. I do millions of calculations per day, but not more than a few by hand or mind. The real wrangling is with steps 1,2 & 4 – real world problems that Conrad describes as knotty and horrible, with hair all over them.