Teaching Children Discrete Mathematics

Video Transcript

"How do you teach children discrete mathematics? Hi, I'm Jimmy Chang. I've been teaching college math for nearly a decade and we're here to talk about how you can teach children discrete mathematics. Now it is a very broad topic and complicated topic that frankly is taught primarily in college and some parts of graduate school in math, but you can actually teach some areas of discrete math at an early age, whether it be elementary school, secondary school, what have you. But the very first thing that you definitely want to think about is what kind of topics of discrete math that you actually want to teach. Now, discrete math, which is finite mathematics described in another way, talks about things involving for example set theory. So if you want to teach discrete math at an early age you can introduce the idea of topics such as markers and pencils and talk about what kind of colors are in each marker box or pencil box, so it gives them an idea of how to learn set theory because set theory deals a lot with elements. Now, for the secondary school levels, whether it be seventh, eighth grade or even high school, you could talk about have students find the shortest distance between two points, or... and that's an example of graph theory because graph theory can involve finding the shortest distance between points, being able to plot different routes to different ideas. And if you have a social science class for example, you could give them a glimpse as to how graph theory can be used to draw political districts, especially in election season. But also, even when kids are as young as five or six years old, you can teach them html coding on the basic levels. There have been elementary school children who have created web pages when they're as little as eight years old. And basic html coding is a very huge application of discrete mathematics. So if you can create areas that the school children can relate to, then they might be learning something very complex at a very early age. So, I'm Jimmy Chang and here are some methods on how to teach discrete math to children."