Attendees came from across North America and as far away as New Zealand. The conference featured over 50 content-based sessions. In addition to the content sessions, participants who were interested in learning how to use GeoGebra could have attended a 2-day “Newbie” workshop. Participants could also have attended a day-long strand on Digital Ethics, featuring sessions on privacy rights, ethics of digital games, and other digital issues.

The conference was opened by Keynote speaker John Golden from Grand Valley State University. Slides from John’s presentation – Teaching for Creativity – can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/goldenggb13. You can follow John on Twitter @mathhombre.

In addition to the host GeoGebra Institute of Ohio, four other North American Institutes were represented at the conference:

• GeoGebra Institute of Maine (James Quinlan)
• GeoGebra Institute of Minnesota (Dave Pugh)
• GeoGebra Institute of Central Florida (Janet Andreasen, Erhan Selcuk Haciomeroglu, and Maria Capursi)
• GeoGebra Institute of South Florida (Ed Knote)
• GeoGebra Institute of Canada (Geoff Roulet and Jill Lazarus)

You can view session handouts at https://sites.google.com/site/ggbmidwest2013/home/session-handouts
and the conference website at https://sites.google.com/site/ggbmidwest2013/.

Thanks to support from GeoGebra, Marcell was able to travel to the USA last week and attend the Rubik’s Cube World Championship 2013 in Las Vegas, see the following video: Marcell at Rubik’s Cube World Championship 2013

Marcell was very successful and is now world champion for blindfolded 3×3, 4×4, 5×5 and multi 3×3 cube solving. We are happy that GeoGebra made it possible for him to participate and live his passion for math and science. Congratulations, Marcell!

Do you want to meet Marcell in person? You will get a chance at the GeoGebra conference in Budapest in January 2014.

Please see the Conference Program for details on all the sessions arranged by the following strands:

• Algebra and Algebra 2

• Geometry

• Probability, Statistics, and Discrete Mathematics

• Precalculus / Calculus

• Early / Middle Grades Learning

Hands-on Workshops

In addition, day-long, hands-on workshops are provided within the conference. The two-day Newbie Workshop is designed for new users while our one-day Digital Ethics Workshop explores issues that impact all educators in our digital age – copyright, privacy, and social media.

Register Today!

There is still time to register and attend the conference. Please visit http://ggbnorthamerica.eventbrite.com and see you in Ohio!

For More Information

For more information, visit the conference website at www.ggbmidwest.com/conference or email co-organizers Steve Phelps <sphelps@madeiracityschools.org> and Todd Edwards <edwardm2@miamioh.edu>.

1) EDU ON AIR – Introduction to GeoGebra Chrome App
Recorded in Las Vegas, while I was Sloan-C / MERLOT conference

2) EDU ON AIR – Using GeoGebra’s Geometry View
Recorded in Denver, Colorado close to the NCTM exhibition hall. There were some problems with the internet connection, but you can see the GeoGebra booth at the NCTM.

3) EDU ON AIR – Using GeoGebra’s Algebra View
Back in Budapest, algebra view.

4) EDU ON AIR – Using GeoGebra’s Spreadsheet View
Spreadsheet view, had some problems refreshing the views. New version came out soon after the hangout, so there shouldn’t be any more problems.

5) EDU ON AIR – Fun with GeoGebra
Invited some developers, GeoGebra Ambassadors. We are going to show some great applications and the future of the Chrome application.

Information to this episode:

• Zbynek showed how inequalities work in GeoGebra. Read more about inequalities by Guillermo our GeoGebra Ambassador.
• Play with the application Fabian created and presented.
• This is still Java based, but you have seen, it is going to work in the Chrome app soon.

A similar kind of workshop is going to take place on Saturday, 19th January 2013 at Maitri College. Again the students will be from department of education (B.Ed. and D.Ed.) with mathematics background. I will share some of the photographs of the event also.

Guest post by Sanjay Gulati, GeoGebra Ambassador

Markus Howenwarter and John Golden will be Keynoting the GeoGebra Conference. Richard Stallman will be Keynote for the Digital Ethics CiC.

Join the event! https://sites.google.com/site/ggbmidwest2013/

Support the conference! http://www.fundageek.com/project/detail/634/2013-GeoGebra-North-America-Conference

Tony took his first degree in psychology from University of Cambridge, his second one is in System Analysis and he gained his Eng.D in Communications Engineering. He started his career as a teacher, moved to a French human factors consultancy in Paris, then BT with whom he worked for many organizations in a consultancy role ranging from Essex County Council to Coventry University, University College London, Specialist Schools Academy Trust, Eurescom, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), AT&T, MCI, Nationwide, Pepsico, DHL, Microsoft, CISCO, Chunghwa Telecom, and Sony in Singapore.

Now he is Educational Development Director at CCITE (Cambridge Centre for Innovation in Technological Education). It was a real pleasure to attend his presentation and to ask some questions after it.

To combine psychology with maths and engineering at first could sound strange but at the end of Tony’s presentation I understood how the two things strengthen each other. What I always felt in our educational system (in a language class of a Hungarian high school) was also proven: engineering and science aren’t championed in the schools. Checking the statistics, the first 4 most popular faculties at universities are: business, law, sociology and art (in the UK, but I’m sure the Hungarian statistics are quite similar) It’s nice that students are interested in these beautiful subjects; the petty is that technology is missing – said Tony.

I remember in the high school we were scared about the math and physic lessons. These subjects were considered extremely difficult studies with absolutely no fun and enthusiastic within. Trying to learn these subjects without understanding them, can be a torture for everyone. I was faced so many challenges during my 17 years of studies also (e.g. there was no internet and not even telephone ;)) and if I didn’t understand something after our teachers’ explanation (it happened many times after math lessons) I had to wait with my questions until the next opportunity to ask them. Now students luckily are more open minded (and their teachers as well) and with internet and with a global and complex tool like Geogebra they can share their ideas from different places of the World, they can work like a real team. Tony’s opinion is that the personal interaction and the global side of Geogebra are as important as the maths.

During the presentation of a flying paper plane in Tony’s presentation I was so impressed that I would like try Geogebra in tango dancing as well, and finally I’ve recognized that there’s so much fun in math and engineering now! I’ve seen cca. 30 open minded young people attending the presentation, full with enthusiasm, some of them even ready to dance in the room I’m sure they are brave enough to ask questions and to try and prove their ideas with Geogebra. What was emphasized by Tony also, together we go still far. Engineering and math is not an alone career. You can try whatever you want as many times as you want.

You can come up with your own ideas at http://www.geogebra.org/cms/en

We can focus on what we know and we have the opportunity to be more spontaneous and creative.

– A Guest post by Edit Lovas.

A short video of the presentation:

Photo by Robin Smidsrød

The summit took place at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. About 300 mentors worldwide came together to have an unconference about participant-driven topics including student selection process, events, financial questions of open source development, free software in education, and more. Lots of important FOSS took part in the sessions like LibreOffice, The GNU Project, KDE, Gnome, PHPBB, Joomla, Mediawiki, Inkscape and Xapian. GeoGebra was represented by Balázs Koren and Zoltán Kovács from Hungary and Austria.

Mentors from other mathematics related free software were also participating, namely Virgilio Gomez Rubio from the R project and Burcin Erocal from Sage. GeoGebra already has some kind of direct connections to both software, and this meeting was a good time to plan further developments between us.

As usual, Google offered a great hospitality to all participants. California was sunny during these days and it was a perfect time to make excursions to important places of the Silicon Valley and San Francisco as well.

San Francisco and the Golden Gate bridge from North

Balazs Koren and Zoltan Kovacs of the International GeoGebra Institute (IGI) lead a series of interactive presentations from 4:00 – 7:00 p.m. The primary aim of the meeting is to introduce participants to the software, share teaching ideas, and build community.

Participants need to bring laptops in order to fully engage in the workshop activities. Light dinner will be provided (RSVP required; email Joanne.RossiBecker at sjsu dot edu by Oct 15 to reserve your seat).

For more information write a comment here or send an e-mail to balazs at geogebra org.

You can download the flyer in .jpg or .pdf format. Please share the information about the workshop. We are looking forward to meet you in San Jose.

Zoltan, Balazs and the local organizers, Joanne and Ferdinand.

P.S.: Thank you @mtoddedwards for the flyer.

You can see an “offline” version of the Saturday morning session from Warsaw, Poland.