Digital technology has much potential to support, extend, enhance and enrich school mathematics education.
At present, most of its use in UK schools seems focused on making traditional pedagogic approaches, such as exposition, worked examples and repeated practice, more efficient. Yet in the ‘real world’ beyond school, the applications of mathematics, and the experience of doing mathematics have been totally transformed by the use of computers to, well, compute.
There is a long history of attempts to integrate digital technology into the nature of school mathematics as a subject, but it is in only a minority of schools where this happens today.
Wolfram (2020) and others have argued for a fundamental transformation in the nature of school mathematics, focussing far more on the problem solving steps of definition, abstraction and interpretation, whilst leaving the dull, mechanical computation to the machines.
Will such an approach characterise mathematical futures in schools, or will the role of digital technology continue to be limited to little more than supporting (or replacing) teachers in their tasks of setting and marking work?