Towards an integrated learning environment for mathematics

Abstract

In recent years the mathematical community has been enriched with various compu­ter programs that facilitate and improve the learning of mathematics. Although many practical and didactical problems still exist, computer aided learning has become a valuable addition to education. How­ever, these successes also lead to high expecta­tions of teachers and learners. For a teacher it would be nice if he or she could review after a computer aided lesson what the students actually did, how much progress they made, which problems arose during learning and to which mathematical subjects attention must be paid in the next lessons. A teacher also wants to reuse ICT-components and to exchange learning materials with colleagues without many conversion problems. Learners expect that they can consult their earlier work and intelligent feedback on this work.

In this paper we will present work realized in the GALOIS Project. This project aimed to real­ize an integrated learning environ­ment for mathematics at secondary school level in which:

students can practise mathematics anytime and anywhere;
mathematical assignments can be generated ‘at random’, so that the amount of exercise material becomes unlimited;
activities and answers of students are stored;
intelligent feedback on students’ work is given automatically.

These goals have been reached by using open source technologies and open standards. Existing technologies have been translated and extended into concepts that work in the practice of school mathematics. We have developed ICT-rich learning materials, such as SCORM compliant exercise material that can be used in any virtual learning environment (VLE) and applets for learning alge­bra that can be customized by the teacher, and we have tried them out in classroom. We will discuss our work and our experiences.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Christian Bokhove: orcid.org/0000-0002-4860-8723

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