A lot of people, specially us teachers and people who feel identified with Humanities more than with hard Sciences, have struggled at least once with mathematical problems. As we were still in school, educational institutions and teachers were unable to do much for the students who needed longer time to understand a given task and were forced to continue with the next one, leaving a bunch of their students frustrated for not understanding and at disadvantage among their peers who managed to reach the objectives in time.
In 2004, Salman Khan made a huge discovery. He started posting math tutorials in YouTube for his nephews, as he was tutoring them from a long distance. Shortly after, other users of the popular video site started posting him comments and thanking him, because his videos helped their children understand mathematics. At that point he realized that he had found a great teaching tool still not fully exploited.
Now in 2012, there are more than 3,400 videos that can be found in Khanacademy.org along with math exercises generators displayed in a game-like fashion to make them more engaging. Teachers can tell their students to do all the exercising they need at home at at their own pace and use the time at school for experimentation, humanizing the classroom.
This system is already being applied in different schools in USA, and, hopefully, we can expect to find it in a school near us soon. As Bill Gates said, this is the future of education. Wouldn’t you agree?
