this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
267 points (91.8% liked)
math
804 readers
5 users here now
General community for all things mathematics on @lemmy.world
Submit link and text posts about anything at all related to mathematics.
Questions about mathematical topics are allowed, but NO HOMEWORK HELP. Communities for general math and homework help should be firmly delineated just as they were on reddit.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Few people? They are high school level where I grew up. Literally everyone with high school diploma must understand at least the sum. In many high schools the final math exam must include at least one integral, that is the infinitesimal sum.
Programming on the other hand isn't thought in most schools
Programming is taught in cheap educational microcontroller kits aimed at 12 year olds. You can find them in the STEM section of just about any toy store. This idea that few people ever learn to code before calculus seems crazy to me, most of my peers were at least writing simple scripts by middle school. This is because programming is much more easily self-taught than other STEM subjects, and can be used to solve more immediate everyday problems kids who grew up with computers might seek to solve.
I'm not saying everyone learns to code before they learn higher math. I am saying that you shouldn't be surprised that the comparisons in the OP have proven popular and insightful for a lot of people, because there are a lot of us who learned to code first.
My school district in Utah did not require any math credits beyond Algebra 2 at the time I graduated. trig and calculus were classes I took because I wanted to. But Utah's STEM requirements are woefully inadequate in my book.