What happens to learning math if you combine Google Glass, Augmented Reality, and Brain computer interfaces?

Do you have trouble reading this text? You probably don’t, because you’re a good reader. But do you have trouble solving the following equation for x: 9x — yz7 = 13 — 4x? It probably takes you more effort. But technology such as Wolfram Alpha can easily solve any equation for you and also give you a step-by-step guide on how to get to the solution. Wolfram Alpha has been allowing middle school students to cheat on their homework for quite a while now, but now a new app takes it one step further and integrates seamlessly with your smart phone camera to solve equations you film from a deadtree page.

Demonstration of PhotoMath

“Immediate feedback is one of the most important factors for learning.”

You might think that this is gimmicky, that it doesn’t matter whether you punch the numbers into Wolfram Alpha or just take a picture, but connected to the right technology, this could be a game changer for learning math. Because immediate feedback is one of the most important factors for learning. When you went to school and handed in your math homework on a Friday and didn’t know whether it was right or wrong until you saw your teacher’s red marks on Monday — that just wasn’t very rewarding. But as any programmer can attest, when you write code and you get immediate feedback in the form of red error messages or when you debug your code and everything runs smoothly all of a sudden — then it’s fun. Hours pass by and before you know it, it’s 4am and soon you’ll have coded for the much quoted 10000 hours it takes to be an expert. The same trick is at play in video games, with slot-machines, Amazon Prime, and really anytime when the delay between the response you give and the feedback you get is minimized — it becomes addictive. That’s why there are more programmers than mathematicians.

Kids got so addicted to Khan Academy’s rapid feedback math problems, that they had to be told to get off the computer

Online learning platforms now use gamification to make learning math as addictive as playing videogames. And it’s already working: during a panel discussion, Sal Khan, the founder of the online learning platform Khan Academy, recounted how some kids became so transfixed by Khan Academy’s rapid feedback math exercises, that they had to be told to get off the computer (with Khan then joking that calculus might not be the worst thing to be addicted to).

Now, imagine this app running on Google Glass, floating before your eyes and augmenting your reality, so that every equation you ever look at would not only be solved immediately, but also visualized in a very intuitive way. And if you were shown the mathematical properties of everyday objects you encounter (such as the Fibonacci series in the petals of a flower), would math become as intuitive as reading?

Would an algebra error just pop out like a typo?

Would an algebra error just pop out like a typo? Would an inelegant mathematical solution just look like a poorly phrased sentence?

And what if we supplied your brain with this same information, not visually, but in an unconventional way? Neuroscientist David Eagleman has recently launched a Kickstarter to fund VEST (Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer), which is a …vest… with lots of small motors that vibrate rapidly over all of your body based on information you feed into it. Trials of this technology have already been carried out, suggesting it could be a real boon to those living with deafness: as you move through your day and its associated soundscape, your smartphone records these sounds, translates all this incoming sound-data, that you cannot hear, into patterns of vibration that you can feel in you torso, and your brain uses these sensations to ‘hear’, having now learned a whole new vocabulary of characteristic vibration patterns for each frequently encountered sound-event. But this sensory substitution could be performed with other kinds of information, not just the sonic type. And Eagleman thinks that you could develop an intuitive knowledge, a kind of sixth sense that guides you in your decision making, about pretty much any class of information. Maybe even math!