Members of the GeoGebra community will vote for the top 25 activities, and experts in primary maths will designate the three winners. The three winners of the ORBIT/GeoGebra competition (and probably some of those on the shortlist) will have their activities posted on the ORBIT wiki alongside teachers from prominent teacher education institutions.

This is a unique opportunity to have your name associated with a high profile, innovative University of Cambridge project.

For further information, see: http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/ORBIT/GeoGebra

Members of the GeoGebra community will vote for the top 25 activities, and experts in primary maths will designate the three winners.

The activity must be open-ended to some degree, supporting interactive teaching and active learning. We are looking for investigations that allow children (age 6-10) to explore an element of mathematics for themselves.

Submitted GeoGebra files and instructions must include:

1) a short overview (max 200 words),
2) list of learning objectives (max 3),
3) description of the underlying pedagogical/teaching approach or rationale (max 50 words),
4) compulsory teacher’s note (max 250 words) which provide instructions, useful tips and recommendations (submissions without teachers’ notes will not be reviewed).

For further information, see: http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/ORBIT/GeoGebra

NB: Prizes include University of Cambridge tee-shirt, mugs, bags and a University of Cambridge/GeoGebra Certificate!

ORBIT GeoGebra Competition

Submit your primary mathematics activity for a chance to win University of Cambridge prizes & certificates and have your activity posted on a high profile educational website!

Members of the GeoGebra community will vote for the top 25 activities, and experts in primary maths will designate the three winners.

More information at http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/ORBIT/GeoGebra

Competition for UK students = opportunity to use GeoGebra!
Tarquin MEI Prize 2013 

Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI), a national mathematics education charity, is working with Tarquin, a publisher and supplier of educational books and materials, to offer an annual prize for post-16 students. The competition is to design a video, animation, GeoGebra file or some other electronic artefact that communicates mathematical ideas being used to solve an engineering or another practical problem of some kind. You can find full details about the competition by following the Prizes link from the Tarquin website at www.tarquingroup.com. You may also wish to consider extending the work that goes into the entry into a larger project that could be used as part of the requirements for the Extended Project qualification. Further details about this qualification are available on the MEI website at www.mei.org.uk/EP

Background and three-stage approach
CCITE propose a set of 20 STEM (Science Technology Engineering Maths) problem solving projects per year to address the technological education teaching weaknesses in the UK (too narrow, not enough teachers, technophobia and high drop-out rate). However, this is not just a UK problem – it is in varying degrees global. And GeoGebra provides a powerful tool to help – the power of Geogebra is in both the software and its Global network and Institutes. We came up with a three-stage approach:

GeoGebra Milestone CCITE 20-20 STEM Projects Internships
Milestone students might individually and/or in small teams be short-term interns who:
* Identify or indeed develop best practice GeoGebra resource which might be used on these STEM projects.
* Work together developing their communication and teamworking skills in a multi-disciplinary manner.
* Form a start-up Budapest Milestone Geogebra network, interworking with the Global and in particular Cambridge network.
* Present their Geogebra CCITE 20-20 solutions on Geogebra site and/or ORBIT (the Cambridge University Open Resource Bank for Interactive Teaching).
* Receive a signed Cambridge attestation (certificate/letter) of their work.
* Any student who is interested would first discuss with their Milestone tutors. A lead Milestone tutor will mentor the team, and subsequently students may enter in contact with CCITE cc their tutor.

Budapest Geogebra CCITE STEM Collaboration
We might extend this initially with the Budapest educators present at our presentation and discussion. Indeed we are delighted to announce our first collaborators: Colleyeder (www.colleyeder.com) and Eötvös Loránd University (http://nipg.inf.elte.hu).

Global Geogebra CCITE STEM Collaboration
We might extend this further with our global GeoGebra friends in many countries of varying international education ratings (see OECD http://www.oecd.org/pisa/CIEB http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/). The highest rating (Shanghai) supports our approach and we feel there is huge potential for global multi-way learning:
The Shanghai core curriculum is the same for all students, an enriched curriculum permits students to choose their own electives and an inquiry-based curriculum is implemented mainly in extra-curricular activities. Learn to solve real-world problems, on cross-disciplinary studies and on the ability to solve problems of a kind that one has not seen before. Notwithstanding Shanghai’s outstanding performance on the PISA assessments, many in Shanghai still see its education system as too rigid and its students as not sufficiently independent and creative to meet the challenges ahead.

We welcome any help we can get:-)

PS See Prezi:
PISA and GeoGebra STEM:

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: