If you are a math teacher, you’ve likely heard of Photomath. The smartphone app, which debuted in early 2015, allows a student to take a photograph of a mathematical equation and then provides not only the solution to that equation, but the steps to solve it.
This app is going to ruin math class this year, and here are four reasons Photomath should be summarily banned:
1. It will make routine textbook exercises worthless. In the past, when teachers assigned #2–40 (even), they could ensure that students would have at least a good twenty to thirty minutes of solid mathematical practice. Now, avoiding the odd problems because the answers are already in the back of the book is pointless because students can just use Photomath to get instant answers to the even ones too.
