Well This Changes Everything, or it Should.

This week in ECI 831 we were tasked with finding a tool or an app that we had not regularly used for education, and reviewing it. The very next day I was talking with an amazing math teacher at my school and he said, “Check out this app Chris. You take a photo of your math question and it solves it.” I was impressed and then he said, “Just wait. You cannot even get around this by telling the students to show their work, because this app shows it step by step. I am going to have to change how I do assignments.” Then the bell rang and we both went to class. I knew immediately that I was going to have to review this app.

The App:

The app in question is Photomath, it is available for a free download for both Android and Iphone.

Does it work as claimed?

The first thing I wanted to do was test if the app worked as it claimed.

I tested this by printing off some math worksheets for multi-step equations. I also went to their website where they have a list of equation examples that you can print off. I also wanted to test it on hand written samples to see how good it was at picking up printing. Here is how it did on each of these hurdles.

The examples from its own website:

• Addition and subtraction = It had no problems at all and showed really detailed step by step instructions.
• Multiplication and Division = It again had no problems and that includes testing it with fractions. The step by step instructions also could be expanded to include more detail if you needed.
• Complex arithmetic operations = Worked perfectly again.
• Factorization and Algebraic fractions = It worked through some complex problems without issue.
• Linear equations with restrictions = Again no problem and it graphs the solutions as well.
• Systems of linear equations = Here it does a couple of things. It solved the equation using multiple methods, it gave you options about which method you wanted to look at. It also of course graphed the solution.
• Integrals and derivatives = No issues. Also the step by step was really helpful to me since it has been a few years and my calculus is rusty.

So yeah, It had no problems with the questions they provide as an example, but that makes sense. It better have no problems with their own stuff.

A third party worksheet:

• I ran it through a selection of worksheets from a program that I had purchased years ago. It did not matter that the questions were laid out in a different format, that the variables used were different letters other than x, y, a, b, and c, or that the font was different. It did it just fine.

Handwritten:

• I did not do an exhaustive test of its handwriting detection. I just wanted to see if reasonably neat handwriting would be recognized. It did pretty well. Some things that I noticed were that you need to remember the little things like putting the degrees sign on your trigonometric functions. It liked sin(30 degrees) but treated sin (30) as a different question. Also it handled both forms of 4, with the closed and open top, it handled curved 9 and straight 9, and normal 7 and crossed (drafting) seven. It thought a crossed (drafting) zero was a theta, which to be honest looks exactly like a theta and more often than not is a theta.

For any mistake that the photo part made there was a manual equation editor that you could use to fix it, and then it would solve the new fixed equation.

Verdict:

Photomath works as stated. While there are some math questions that it could not handle yet, like graphing systems of inequalities, the app is continually being revised and I would be very surprised if within a couple of years if could do every kind of math equation that any high schooler would ever face. (minus the word problems, maybe.)

Teacher reaction:

I wanted to know if my math colleagues thought this was a good or a bad thing. Also, I was curious how the existance of this app was affecting the math class that my colleague teaches. So on Friday during lunch I tracked him down and asked him about it. The first thing he asked was if I had shown any students. I hadn’t. That calmed him. He said that he knows that students are going to come across this app likely sooner rather than later so he is trying to figure out what he is going to do. He already has his gradebook setup and is halfway through the semester. There is work that he expects to be done at home, and for at least this semester some of that work counts for marks. He said that he already suspects that there are some students that might be using it because their homework is so much better done than their in class work, but he does not think it is widespread yet. He thinks this since so many students are still doing poor quality homework (a good thing in this case?).

When he said all of this, I then became curious how he had heard about the app. He said that he was searching for math apps to create practice quizzes, and focused study help for students that were struggling. That when he came across it last week. He uses a lot of the kinds of programs that we have talked about in class, things like Kahoot, Socrative, and more. So I am not surprised that he found this app before many others.

He also said that while it is causing him to rethink how homework works, that this was more of a wakeup call than an all out crisis. He says you already have no guarantee that the student is the one doing the homework, and that spotting plagarism in math is next to impossible, whereas in other subjects you at least have a chance of spotting it. The homework portion of his mark setup is relatively low, with in class work and tests making up 80% of the students mark at this time. He was already leaning towards removing any mark for work done at home, but now he knows that this is the last semester he will ever give marks for homework.

So now what?

If you are a math teacher this kind of uncomfortable truce with technology is nothing new. Many of us grew up with teachers telling us to put away the calculators and to learn things by rote. Many of the current generation is growing up with a calculator that they literally carry everywhere with them. There is a lot of debate/soul searching happening around math curriculums in Canada and the world right now. So what is the solution? If you asked this question in a coffeeshop everyone would have an opinion and many of them would focus around the idea of back to basics, or doing more practice. You would even here a lot of the phrase back in my day we . . . The problem is that we are not back in anyone’s day. The tools available to students now make earlier approaches unpracticle, and unreliable. Especialy since the student is very unlikely to avoid the use of these tools. So how do we work with the tools available?

I know that photomath is too new to have any studies done on it, but I remembered that Wolfram Alpha was a computational search engine that could do similar things, and I remembered that the creator of it felt that math education needed to change. So I went looking for what he had to say, because I knew that he would be thinking about the issue. Was he ever! In fact he gave a TED talk about this way back in 2010.

There is a lot to process in this talk. In fact he did more than just give a talk about this. He started a whole organization about this called computerbasedmath.org which looks at how to teach math better using computers. I think that teaching computer based math was an option in 2010, in 2017 (soon 2018) it is essential.

I think that teaching computer based math was an option in 2010, in 2017 (soon 2018) it is essential!

I recommend you watch the TED talk if you teach anything like math or science. I also suggest you download the Photomath app because you are going to want to start to understand how students could use this as a positive thing. I know that for myself I am already thinking that next semester’s physics is going to look at lot different than last spring’s physics class because of the existance of this kind of stuff. I am only one person in a whole school though. I need to make sure that what I do is not going to cause huge headaches for others.  So I need to, in the next month, talk with all the math and science people in my school and figure out now what? I think that Conrad Wolfram might just have a possible path forward for us.

Well, thanks for stopping by. Let me know how this affects you. I forsee good things potentially, but it will require us to change. Continuing as is, is definitely not the correct option.