“The Impact of Technology to Mathematics”

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Math 313

Name: Gabriento, Flora Mae S.

Instructor: Dr. Gary D. Garcia

The birth of technology made our job easier and not time consuming. It is integrated in
many fields such as the complex and difficult subject, mathematics. It helps students, teachers,
engineers, etc. to do complex and vast mathematical computations efficiently and with
convenience. Unlike before they use sticks, stones, beads, abacus and other things to compute
large number which is very time consuming. Although technology helped a lot to compute easily
and understand more about the different areas of mathematics it also has a negative impact
aside from being useful.

In the given article I choose two statements which I opposed. The first statement is
“researchers have found that when calculators are available to offload details computations,
teachers can focus better”, this statement showed that it made the computations of a teacher
easier but for me being dependent of using a calculator will lead you to laziness. Since in reality
many people are not able to do mental computations and even a simple computation needs to
be checked with a calculator because they are no longer confident with their answers because
of the lack of mental computation practice. This will lead to stupidity and find it hard to compute
without cellphones/calculator. And the second statement is, “with an ICT-based geometry tool,
students can grab and drag a corner of a geometric construction of a triangle and see how it
behaves under transformations”, this is good, interesting and fun because as Dewey said
student learn best if they engage themselves in the activities given about the lesson but the
problem is the students attention will be no longer at the teacher they will continue exploring by
themselves and tend to forget the important principles of the subject matter because they enjoy
it. And they become passive that is why some facts will not be remembered.

Therefore, I could say that we users of the technology aided for mathematics should be
more responsible and we should not be very dependent to it because we will be used to doing
short cuts in solving a problems since we have an application which will automatically provide
the answer that will make it hard for us to explain how we arrived with that answer most
importantly we are aiming to become teachers.

I suggest that teachers will train students in doing mental computations and the use of
geometric tools should be well guided to avoid division of attention during discussion. And
students should refrain in using mathematical applications to answer an equation or problem
without knowing how it was done.