The Convergence of 'Math' & 'Art'

The hardest thing to do is to try and teach something that everyone already knows. Everyone knows how to listen, how to read, how to think, and how to tell anecdotes about the events in their lives. Young people do these things almost everyday. Yet the challenge is that the level of any of these skills, possessed by the average individual, may not be adequate for certain special situations. Examples: Psychotherapists must be expert listeners and lawyers expert readers; research scientists must scour their thinking for errors and journalists report stories that transcend normal story-telling.

There is another dimension to the complexity of learning: our world is increasingly being  indexed, and measured, and this massive quantity of information and data has a story to tell. But it is a foreign language to the human brain, columns and rows of data. Math courses taught us to manage numbers that come in the dozens. But when they are counted in exabytes, then our young people need new ways to interpret the data, new ways to help them tell their story. The answer: Computationl thinking - the new convergence of 'math' & 'art'