International-software-engineering-journals

The 2012, July 28 New York Times, Sunday Review, The Opinion Pages editorial “Is Algebra Necessary?” raised once more, not only in the U.S., legitimate questions on math teaching in high school and college. Published comments, both on the newspaper’s Reader’s Comments section, as well as elsewhere in the Internet (e.g. the LinkedIn ACM Group discussion on are somewhat surprisingly assuming that implies suppressing school algebra studies (although only its title might mislead–but titles are often used to better sell the paper–,as no such thing is stated in), and are clearly divided into two categories: those that still fear math, and especially algebra (and would gladly applaud suppressing it immediately), and those that either love, like, or/and use it directly (and are outraged by such a possible suppression). Being involved for some 35 years both in the IT industry (mostly in Software Engineering) and in University Computer Science teaching, but also being a father (of both IT and non IT graduates, as well as of very young pupils), I consider this topic a very important and challenging one, even when restricted to math teaching for tomorrow’s IT and, especially, Software Engineers. starts from U.S. wide statistics showing that mainly algebra, but math in general too, is the main obstacle that blocks more than 40% of the students both in high school graduation and college enrollment. This is true also in other countries, including mine: let’s call them for the rest of this paper the unfortunate ones. As, fortunately, there are also countries where this is not happening (e.g. Germany, Japan, Finland, South Korea, Canada, etc. let’s call them here the fortunate ones), it is clear that there exist solutions for significantly improving at least the above percentage.This paper tries to summarize some basic facts and widespread relevant opinions in this area, and concludes with some suggestions aiming at better teaching math, both generally and, especially, for tomorrow’s IT engineers, with emphasis on software ones. (Is Math Adequately Taught for Tomorrow’s Software Engineers?, Christian Mancas)

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Last date updated on September, 2024