Do you use GeoGebra not only for mathematics teaching? Please read the announcement of an interesting competition on (STEM) course development. Please read the introduction below or visit the site of the contest.
Introduction
The GeoGebra community has brought to life an enormous collection of tools, demonstrations, explanations, quizzes, and alike with the GeoGebra software (interactive geometry, algebra, and calculus application). Colleyeder Ltd. and GeoGebra together now are about to make a step further and draw on the creative power of the community to extend and organize them. We would like to
- broaden the scope to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM).
- organize the individually created materials into courses that enable personalized learning. There are multiple options.
First of all we develop this new site for your ideas that we call STEMGebra.
We are interested in the answers to the following questions:
- Can you improve the plan? What kind of improvements are you suggesting?
- Do you envision alternative plans that would rely on the GeoGebra community?
- Do you envision alternative routes to broaden the scope of GeoGebra?
The site is hosted by the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest at present to allow for an easy management and up-date of the intelligent components of the site. These components are meant to serve the community and we will try to extend them according to your needs. We describe these present and envisioned functions of our intelligent site.
The first step of the approach we suggest is a competition to make a course that has all the four components of STEM and makes use of the strengths of GeoGebra – geometry as well as algebra. We will start with a competition that develops an acoustic course. Developers will be encouraged to team up and submit a course material for two kinds of courses on acoustics – and the winning courses will undergo testing (at schools and by individual volunteers) in order to evaluate and improve them further.
The curriculum of such an initiative has the advantage of being
- personalized for individual needs
- dynamic
- extendable (the STEM process is example based)
- fresh/up-to-date
- effective
Short term timeline:
- Official start of the discussions on the site: January 1, 2013.
- Official announcement of the competition: February 1, 2013.
- Submission of courses on acoustics: April 30, 2013.
- Announcement of the winners: May 31, 2013
Suggested time for taking and evaluating the courses is between June 1 and July 31, 2013. We intend to use high-tech tools for monitoring and evaluation.
Long term goals
We aim to go beyond the single course by our novel course development strategy employing innovative and high-tech methods of quality assurance and personalization. On a larger scale we want to build a ‘World Wide Observatory’ (WWO) for high-school education on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) in order toexplore the needs and evaluate and improve the strengths of the training methods according to these needs. This covers talent discovery, tools for special needs, and the improvement of individual learning trajectories. We also intend to research the technology of an ‘Artificial Tutoring Buddy’ (ATB) – an artificial system that can reliably mimic the best teachers and the best practices under most circumstances. It is in question if the time is ripe for the development of an ATB, but there is no doubt that it should be useful for helping children and youngsters of remote and rural areas. In turn, we intend to establish the potentials and limitations of ATB technology.
Steps towards the ‘Artificial Tutoring Buddy’
In the testing phase we will monitor the behavior (facial expression tracking through webcam) of students during learning, including the behavior of and the interaction of – as well as the outcome of the interaction with – the teacher. Sophisticated monitoring methods will enable us to decide if this effort is promising for ATB development.
As we believe in gamification, we will set up a multi-player, internet-based, risk-taking game for students, called ‘Land and Fame’ on the portal.
This intelligent portal will be able to produce explanations of concepts related to words present on the portal, including conversations, e.g., chats and forum since it will be backed by Wikipedia and other knowledge bases.
By using a wiki system we generate an interactive dialogue, where users can comment, blog, chat or use the mediawiki pages for communication. Explanations and feedbacks of users serve to improve personalized information delivery, team forming, and course development.
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