Speaking of Wolfram, I learned calculus (in my freshman year of college) in a then-new, Mathematica-based course called Calculus & Mathematica. (My backwoods high school had no pre-calc or calculus).
I really liked it; we were freed of the boring mechanical stuff, leaving time to better learn the underlying concepts. There were plenty of examples that non-programmer-types could copy, paste and tweak. (As a side effect, the then-shiny, new NeXTStations got me interested in then-new Linux).
It seems to still be going today, though I've not kept up with the people.
I thank you for posting this. I took AP CS instead of calculus this year after I watched Wolfram's TED talk. I was worried that eventually I would have to learn calculus the normal way.
Do they offer online classes? How am I going to get around taking calculus the normal way?
This guy says that the problem is that high-school math education is structured to prepare people to learn calculus in their freshman year of college. But only a small minority of students ever takes calculus, and an even smaller minority ever uses it. And not many people ever make much use of pre-calc subjects like algebra, trig, or analytic geometry.
Instead, high-school math should be structured to prepare people to learn statistics. Probability and basic statistics, he argues, are not only more generally useful than calculus, they are also more fun.
I have to agree with him. What do the people here think?