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17 December 2024

By Rachael Levy and Jennifer Chung

‘Technology is bad for kids!’ This statement has become something of a slogan in recent years with parents, teachers, educationalists and health workers, among others, raising the alarm about the ways in which technology is deemed to be damaging children. You may have seen the recent Channel 4 programme ‘Swiped’, which removed smartphones from children in an attempt to improve child well-being. Recurring themes include concerns about harmful online content, cyberbullying and screen addiction, often resulting in the call for all children, especially young children, to be protected from the digital world as much as possible.

However, the world we live in is digital. To take the example of literacy, we know that learning to read now includes developing skills to make sense of screen texts, and learning to write now includes learning to code using programming languages. This raises challenging questions for the field of early childhood education, particularly in relation to potential tensions between the desire to offer children opportunities to develop the digital literacy skills needed to succeed in the future and the desire for them to avoid the harmful effects of technology. (more…)

1 December 2020

By Celia Hoyles

The Covid-19 pandemic is raising public anxiety not just about the virus but about the maths being used to explain how it spreads and how it can be controlled. What is the so-called R value? What do we mean by “flattening the curve”?

And if people were not confused enough, what are we to make of a slide like this, shown by the Prime Minister last Spring, which presents us with an equation that makes no mathematical sense? How did you react to it I wonder? I remember thinking I must have heard it wrongly, provoking me to consider the ‘equation’ more carefully. For many it might have been just one more instance of confirming ‘I cannot understand mathematics’.

If the pandemic brings no other benefits, it will surely answer the question: “Why is maths relevant to my life?” But this won’t necessarily help people to process the meaning behind large numbers and complicated graphs presented (more…)