I participated in Special Course on Didactical Mathematics at the University of Joensuu on July 30th - August 3rd, 1998. The course was held by professor Ed Dubinsky from Georgia State University. Next I am going to talk about the course and tell what kind of impact the course had on me.

On the first day I became acquainted for example with some beliefs and choices about how people learn. That was very interesting and it also had some connections with the courses I had taken on teacher's training. It can never be emphasized enough how important it is to make the students to think by themselves and construct information by themselves. Professor Dubinsky really made me think about teacher's role on students' learning and that it is not just all the same how teacher teaches students. Getting familiar with the active and cooperative learning was very interesting and teaching, too. As a conclusion I could say that the first day really filled my expectations.

The next two and half days were reserved for computer lab exercises. ISETLW-program was not that easy! I think that before starting using ISETLW one should have some kind of experience on programming, for example with Pascal. I belong to those students who have no experience on programming and that's why I found ISETLW kind of hard. Of course it is easy to write simple sentences which are given ready on the work sheet but when you have to write programs by yourself, then it is a different case... But the more you practice the better you come with programming. I noticed that by myself.

In my opinion ISETLW is a suitable program for university students, who have at least a little experience on programming. I think that ISETLW is a little bit too difficult for junior high and high school students because the students do not have that much experience on programming. But as I said before: Practice makes perfect... ISETLW would be just an ideal program for those junior high and high school students who are interested in programming and want to conquer things by themselves.

On the last day Asuman Oktac told us her teaching experiment: distance education in Mexico. I found her presentation very interesting and teaching, too. Distance education might sound hard and of course it is harder than "usual" education but it has many advantages, too. Students learn to work harder to achieve their goal and learn to communicate with students from other universities. Communication is a very important part in learning mathematics efficiently. I think that distance education could be used in Finnish universities, too. That is the case if one university has an interesting mathematics course that students from other universities would like to participate in.

As a whole this course made me to realize the power of group work. For example when working with computers it was so beneficial to communicate with the other members of the group. One might have one idea and the other another idea and combining these ideas together there will be the whole solution or at least a big part of it... I also learned that computer programs like ISETLW or Maple V can be used to teach new things to students. When a student constructs the information by himself, I am sure he understands the things much better because he has found out the things by himself.

These four days convinced me that we teachers must make the learning challenging enough for today's students. It is not enough that we use only traditional teaching methods but we have to be ready to take the technology to the teaching and learning.

I think it would be interesting to study how much the learning and especially the learning results differ when one group is taught in a traditional way and the other group for example with using Maple V -program. The teaching theme could be for example differentiation rules.