Making math fun for young people requires all the allies you can get, but watching videos has little to do with learning.
Making math fun for young people requires all the allies you can get, but watching videos has little to do with learning.
david thomas
Axiom Maths CEO
April 5, 2024, 5:00
Tik talk? math? It reminds me of a joke comedian Peter Kay did about garlic bread. 'garlic? bread?'.
But this week I saw a couple of stories (on my social media feeds, of course) that seemed to suggest that TikTok was doing ‘good things’ for math.
The first story was about TikTok adding a STEM feed to the home screen for all users under 16 in the UK. Since the feature was added in the U.S., one-third of U.S. teens under 16 say they use it every week.
The second story was about deepfake videos of celebrities teaching math. The most popular video, with over 10 million views, is a rapper named Ice Spice (I learn something new every day) teaching about logs.
Over Easter, prompted by the publication of Jonathan Haidt's book anxious generation, everyone is talking about smartphones. My social media is full of people arguing about how bad it is for kids and what we should do about them.
Tik Tok claims this is just the latest step in creating educational content. #booktalk Although it has already become a so-called ‘literary phenomenon’, #LearnonTikTok “We encourage our community to discover everything from local languages to ancient history.”
We are very used to hearing about the negative effects of social media. But can TikTok actually help teach math to kids?
Research by Axiom Maths found that around 30,000 talented primary school children are 'lost' when they enter secondary school. The biggest factor is that maths is seen as uncool and high-achieving students worry about being labeled as 'nerds'. Too many young people feel they have to hide their love of maths in order to fit into society.
We need all the allies we can get to dismantle society's perception that liking math is unusual and that students should be ashamed of the power of math rather than proud of it. If TikTok's STEM feed helps give young people the confidence they can be themselves, that's a good thing.
And it's hard to argue that watching STEM videos is a bad thing if students are using TikTok anyway. It's definitely more wholesome than many alternative topics. And there are sure to be examples of people who have stumbled across things that spark genuine interest.
But don't kid yourself that scrolling through 60-second disconnected video clips is learning.
Learning happens when we think hard about things. There is a big difference between seeing something and learning it. To learn something, you have to practice working with it, manipulating it, and applying it. We have to retrieve it, come back to it, and put it in a new context. It is a mental exercise that encodes memories in our minds. Flipping through short video clips doesn't come close to this.
Learning also takes place as part of the curriculum. Finding out isolated facts may be good for a pub quiz or trivia, but it's not a way to build understanding of a topic or the world.
We run a huge risk if we convince ourselves that learning is when students watch new math videos. The problem with smartphones is not so much the phones themselves, but the activities they replace: social media, social media, and social media. #mathstok cannot afford to replace real math.
So, is STEM TikTok better than regular TikTok? maybe. But let's not kid ourselves that that's what we're teaching our kids. This feels like simply checking a box for TikTok. They might argue that educational contentBut that's not the case education.