Our society is highly dependent on technology, and maintaining this technology requires a very well educated workforce, especially in math and science. But math education has barely changed in the past several centuries. In this episode, host Martin Wasserman examines some of the new approaches to math education with his three guests.
Peter Friess is President and CEO of the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA in the heart of Silicon Valley, and he's also an experienced clockmaker.
Keith Devlin is a mathematician and Director of Stanford University's H-STAR Institute, which studies the relationship between technology and people. He won the 2007 Carl Sagan Award for popularization of science, and is known to NPR listeners as "The Math Guy" on Weekend Edition. He's written 28 books.
Salman Khan is the creator of the Khan Academy, a one man Internet operation that aims to provide free, world class education to anyone, anywhere. His 1400+ instructional youtube videos have been viewed over 16,000,000 times, and he won the 2009 Microsoft Education Award for using technology to benefit humanity.
All three guests have extensively studied the problem of math education, and are actively working on ways to improve it.