As a new institute, born in the summer of 2012, our main goal is to make GeoGebra easy to reach for Mongolian educational institutions, professors, students and teachers. The first step on this probably long road was translating the software (GeoGebra 4.0 and 4.2) to Mongolian language since we think getting acquainted with the software in one’s  mother tongue is the most essential for it becoming  popular. Then we started to organize local workshops: first at the National University of Mongolia, School of Mathematics and Computer Science with 20 participants, then at the Mongolian State University of Education with 100 participants, both held in December, 2012.

Mongolia is quite a big country, its territory is more then 1 500 000 km2. Almost half the population, 1 700 000 people live in Ulanbator (literally “Red Hero”), in the capital. Navchaa, our chair is very enthusiastic about designing video tutorials, which she shares with primary and secondary school teachers to help them introduce GeoGebra into their classrooms. Till now, a huge number,  840 teachers have participated in her video lessons from almost all provinces in Mongolia; this year she is planning to produce some more  video tutorials.

This summer we plan to finish translation of GeoGebra 5.0 into Mongolian language. As Navchaa works at the National University of Mongolia as a professor for teaching initial teacher students to Mathematics, and her research focus is the integration of ICT into Mathematics teaching, this year she will integrate GeoGebra into her “Introduction of Mathematical software” course.

Organizing competitions both for students and teachers will be part of our plans for this year to make GeoGebra even more popular and fun.

For more information please visit our site at http://www.smcs.num.edu.mn/geogebra and join our facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/GeogebraMNG.

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

In the following series, we are going to introduce some special members of our community, the GeoGebra Ambassadors. Our Ambassadors are special members of the community.

Meet the first member of the GeoGebra Ambassador team:

Who are you, what are you doing?

I am Guillermo P. Bautista Jr. I work at the University of the Philippines National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development (UP NISMED). Our Institute is involved in teacher training, curriculum materials development, and educational research.

My work in our Institute focuses on the integration of computers in teaching mathematics. I use GeoGebra and other software to promote teaching through problem solving.

When did you first try GeoGebra?

I first tried GeoGebra in 2005. Since then, I have used it in numerous trainings, seminars, and workshops.

What do you hate in GeoGebra?

GeoGebra applets load slowly in some browsers. There are times that the applets do not load at all in old computers.

What do you love in GeoGebra?

In my blog post, 15 reasons why GeoGebra is successful, I have enumerated what I love about GeoGebra. Below are some of my reasons.

• It is FREE.
• It is open source and developed collaboratively by us: programmers, teachers, mathematicians, and users – not just a few people.
• It runs in multiple operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.).
• It runs in different devices (computers, mobile phones, tablets).
• It highlights mathematical connections (algebra, geometry, calculus, statistics, etc.).

What are the GeoGebra related activities you participate?

• I have been involved in integrating GeoGebra in our Institute’s teacher trainings here in the Philippines since 2006.
• Our Institute has offered short-term courses for pre-service and in-service teachers. I served as one of the lecturers.
• I am one of the key persons who pushed through the establishment of the GeoGebra Institute of Metro Manila, the GeoGebra Institute here in our country.
• I have written more than 50 GeoGebra tutorials in my blog and have developed more than 200 applets.
• I have used and promoted GeoGebra in my presentations in conferences and workshops.

Ivan Petrović, PhD student at University of Belgrade

The EACA conference has just ended, but the hard development in theorem proving did not stop. Our Serbian contributor Ivan Petrović did very nice improvements on GeoGebra by working hard on the OpenGeoProver (OGP) prototype during the last week. Now the desktop version of GeoGebra has 5 possible ways to prove a statement, and OGP, the latest one, does a really good job.

Predrag Janičić, associate professor at University of Belgrade

Now the recent benchmarks show that Ivan’s prover (based on Predrag Janičić‘s GCLC, but fully rewritten in Java) gives the correct answer in 40 out of the 44 test cases, and beats the other provers in the most difficult computations, namely the Desargues’s theorem and the Simson line. In general, it has the second best average in computation time (Recio: 89, OGP: 315, Botana: 540, PureSymbolic: 2091 ms), and the best standard deviation (OGP: 250, Recio: 399, Botana: 2226, PureSymbolic: 9467 ms), which means OGP is the most stable prover engine for GeoGebra at the moment. (The 5th prover is the Auto method: it tries to find the best prover engine by using some heuristics. This is the default in GeoGebra.)

The official announcement of our joint work will be on 22 June at the CADGME conference in Novi Sad, Serbia.

There won’t be just one blogger behind this effort but I’ll be standing in as editor/guardian. I try to manage the community at GeoGebra. I am a mathematics teacher in Hungary and a father of three kids. I’ve used GeoGebra for a long time, joined the team last year. It is a pleasure to be part of something that revolutionizes the mathematics education worldwide.

Stay tuned for more. Drop us a line as well if you have any ideas, editorial suggestions.

Expect a few changes in the design and structure of the blog in the near future.