"students can now solve problems that were previously too time-consuming to attempt, and can focus on underlying concepts."
The question should be whether the more time-consuming problems are helping to understand the underlying concepts.
In my experience this is not always the case. My high school maths teacher made us do extensive graph plotting by hand and it was slow and tedious.
At university, my physics course used software to visualise vector fields. We could tweak the inputs and see WHAT it did immediately. We could examine much more complicated scenarios and it seemed we were gaining an intuitive feel for the subject, but we didn't really learn HOW the inputs lead to the outputs so we couldn't apply the knowledge to other scenarios (even simpler ones) without the software.
2 decades on, and I wouldn't know where to start if I had to tackle even a trivial vector field but I can still picture reasonably complex graphs in my head just from looking at a formula which I find surprisingly useful in everyday life.
Perhaps mine was just not a very good course (in an otherwise excellent program) but care should be taken to ensure the technology really does aid the understanding of the underlying concepts and not distract from them.
The question should be whether the more time-consuming problems are helping to understand the underlying concepts.
In my experience this is not always the case. My high school maths teacher made us do extensive graph plotting by hand and it was slow and tedious.
At university, my physics course used software to visualise vector fields. We could tweak the inputs and see WHAT it did immediately. We could examine much more complicated scenarios and it seemed we were gaining an intuitive feel for the subject, but we didn't really learn HOW the inputs lead to the outputs so we couldn't apply the knowledge to other scenarios (even simpler ones) without the software.
2 decades on, and I wouldn't know where to start if I had to tackle even a trivial vector field but I can still picture reasonably complex graphs in my head just from looking at a formula which I find surprisingly useful in everyday life.
Perhaps mine was just not a very good course (in an otherwise excellent program) but care should be taken to ensure the technology really does aid the understanding of the underlying concepts and not distract from them.