Exploiting Information Technology in Mathematics Teaching -project
Summer-autum 1998
One has collected a www page of material suitable for mathematics teaching
that is found in Internet. The page contains the links to the actual material
pages a short description of the material. For the most part the links
point to Maple worksheets, and there are also many on-line lecture notes
and Java applets pertaining to university mathematics.
We have examined the different ways of presenting mathematical information
in the web, and especially how one can put TeX-documents on one's wwww-pages.
At this moment (December 1998) one has to either translate the TeX-document
to html-form by some software, or use a plugin for viewing the TeX document.
The possibility of the future lies in the MathML language. Currently
one can use many programs for authoring of MathML but none of the usual
browsers (Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer) does support it yet.
Additionally we collected the feedback from the algebra course using a
www-form.
THe algebra course in the autumn term 1998 has been exploiting the teaching
method of Ed Dubinsky. Students have spent each week two hours in the computer
lab using ISETL software and solving mathematical problems. Taina Malvela
and Martti Pesonen have been guiding these ISETL exercises. Taina
Malvela has lectured the course and planned the computer exercises and
homework problems. The course has been exceptional in other ways too: the
studenst have done all their homework problems in groups, and there was
one group exam in the course.
The project worker Taina Malvela has additionally planned MAPLE exercises
for the differential geometry course, and guided some of the personnel
of the department in using mathematical software. The MAPLE exercises for
differential geometry are in the web in the differential geometry page.
Part of the exercises is MAPLE worksheets, part LaTeX documents.