Training the Teachers in Tech

In 2013 the Kenyan government announced it had enough foreign aid to put a laptop in the hands of every schoolchild in the country. The problem was very few of the teachers were computer literate! There's a similar problem in the US, even in Silicon Valley: everybody has a computer, but computer programming is not taught as a core subject.

I was a math teacher and more recently a computer science teacher, and my goal is to change that. After being inspired by Seymour Papert's Mindstorms, I taught every one of my classes some basic "Turtle Geometry," creating surprisingly complicated designs using loops and functions. Papert made a good case that everything worth doing in math class can be done with a computer.

This is not about enabling students to avoid doing math, quite the opposite. If you've ever tried to teach a computer how to do something, you'll realize that you really have to know what you're doing! The computer will happily give you the wrong answer without so much as a question mark if you make a mistake programming it. To create math tools (functions) using a computer, you need to know your math!

I just published a book, Hacking Math Class Using Python, which contains all the code necessary to automate some of the most common tasks in Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry and Calculus, like factoring polynomials, solving equations and calculating integrals. Every math textbook has pictures of fractals like the Mandelbrot set, but mine shows you step-by-step how to make one using Python. The purple fractal in the picture above is a "Pythagorean Tree" that follows simple rules but can get as complicated as you want.

Computer graphics are an engaging application of math topics like coordinate systems, angles, rotations, vectors, matrices and so on. Math and science classes would benefit from having students model situations in 3D graphics, and Python makes that easy. 

I would love to get this information to teachers and I need help meeting the right people. Do you know a "Technology Coordinator" at a school or school district with whom I could get in touch? It would be great to meet people who are interested in getting 21st-Century technology in the hands of our teachers. Thank you!