There are many educators who passionately believe that it’s important to keep updating the educational curriculum at all levels. It’s surprisingly easy to allow courses to become outdated or even worse less than relevant to students lives. Some subjects of course are easier than others to keep updated, lessons like languages and some of the sciences are quite easy to adapt to modern times but others less so.
Many suggest that this failure to adapt some areas of the curriculum to the modern age, are responsible for shortages in certain subject areas. For example there are huge shortages of maths and science teachers in many developed countries across the world. It is often thought that these subjects need updating and instilling more relevance to the core lessons of the subject. Mathematics is one of those areas and it’s important to use current situations and technology to illustrate the part this subject plays in our daily lives.
Just like many educational departments have drastically updated their technology courses, then maths is seen as another target for improvement. Showing how maths can be used in the modern digital age is very useful. Perhaps implementing the algorithms used in encrypting servers in order to protect privacy or install the latest configuration of sneaker proxies which can be the start of a thriving eBay empire. Other important and interesting topics are studying the mathematics behind bitcoin and blockchain which are likely to become a much bigger part of our lives.
According to a very rough translation of the test paper passing around on Reddit, Dutch college students were presented the following question and introduction:
” Bitcoin is an electronic currency that solely exists online. It has survived since January 1st, 2009, and can be used as payment method in ecommerce sites and with regard to other internet services. Bitcoin is certainly not, like traditional money, created by a central bank. Rather, all bitcoin which exist are simply created by having computers take part in resolving particular mathematical problems. This operates as follows: everyone is able to run special software on his or her computer that participates in working out such an arithmetical problem. The owner of the computer that solves the problem obtains 25 (recently created) bitcoin as a prize. Due to the fact that it was the case that in 2014 such a problem is resolved every 10 minutes, 25 new bitcoins were simply created each and every 10 minutes. On January 1st, there were (approximately) 12.2 million bitcoin.”
Following from the preceding overview, pupils were actually asked to deal with five assorted mathematical problems. The questions asked that students “determine in exactly what year the volume of bitcoin went above 18 million,” “compute from which year during the reward will be actually less than one bitcoin,” “calculate the greatest quantity of bitcoin that could be in circulation,” in addition to posing addition challenges based on the formula used to figure out the previously mentioned queries.
Netherlands Starting to Embrace Crypto Technology
Dutch Senior High School Examination Features Bitcoin-Themed questions. The released test has already been supplied to students complying with increasing awareness of cryptocurrency on the part of Holland’s companies.
During March, the Court of Amsterdam determined that bitcoin displays “properties of wealth” whilst settling a civil rights case concerning an individual pursuing repayment from an unfinished agreement concerning bitcoin mining. The court concluded that “bitcoin represents a value and is transferable” and “thus shows characteristics of a property. A claim for remittance in Bitcoin is, for that reason, to be regarded as a claim that qualifies for verification.”
Using electronic cash is more important as the level of e-commerce develops, there are already many forms but nothing as advanced and flexible as using crypto currency. The privacy part is essential too, if you’re investing in some secure virtual private network in order to enjoy your match of the Day stream from some foreign country – it’s useful to be able to pay anonymously and discretely. Obviously there are dangers too, in that technology like this can be used by criminals and terrorists which is another reason we need mathematicians to develop and improve the technology and it’s implementation.
Earlier this month, the minister of the Dutch Blockchain Coalition, Rob van Gijzel, delivered a national blockchain research agenda, which in turn had been commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy. The ministry had developed a designated board, TopTeam ICT, entrusted with investigating the potential legal, economic, and ethical significance of dispersed ledger technology in the Netherlands.