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>.

The mathematics education community is constantly engaged in finding out how children best learn mathematics. The current National Curriculum Framework (NCF-2005) in India, developed by NCERT describes two goals, a “narrow aim” and a “higher aim” of mathematics education. The higher aim is about developing the children’s inner resources to think and reason mathematically, so that they become capable of making logical conclusions and handling abstractions. While following the „narrow aims” means equipping children with very good algorithmic skills by just having them remember the formulas.  At NCERT our  ambition is to chieve this „higher aim” rather than only the „narrow aim”.

As NCF recommends, the teacher’s role is to create opportunities for children to build their own understanding of concepts. However, if only we could discover precisely how children best learn mathematics then we could work out exactly how to teach them the subject in the most effective way.

It is easy to realize that GeoGebra promotes experimental learning and  can be used to represent mathematical content in multiple ways. So, the question – is can an innovative integration of GeoGebra in Mathematics curriculum support the learning of mathematics adapted to the children’s own learning styles?

Even though GeoGebra can influence what is taught, teachers need to design the suitable instructions and environment that best support this approach. Well-applied  GeoGebra can support  requirements of learning outcomes  as it helps the children process mathematical concepts through investigation and problem solving.

GeoGebra can also be seen as a catalyst for a paradigm shift. Since educational materials and books became accessible for everyone jn an electronic form, education has experienced a gradual shift away from the idea that its success relies on the student’s capacity to memorize and accurately recall large amounts of information.

Instead, greater emphasis has been placed on developing research and problem-solving skills; on equipping students with effective inquiry skills, including the ability to find and process new information using digital technologies. Many educators now see GeoGebra, with its interconnectedness, as an environment rather than just a tool for learning and teaching. The difference between these two perspectives is significant, the former requiring a fundamental change in methodology and teaching practice for many teachers. We should draw a road map for achieving the ultimate target of the highly progressive GeoGebra enabled Mathematics curriculum.

P.K. Chaurasia will be one of our key-note speakers at the pre-ATCM GeoGebra conference in Mumbai, December 2013. Follow his work at http://pkchaurasia.iitiancollege.info.

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:

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

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

Here are the slides from the closing:

The slides from the presentations will be online tomorrow. can be found on the Conference site. Thank you for the great presentations.

Markus’ greeeting video:

The keynote of Zsolt and Balazs:

More information on the Conference website. Thanks for joining the Conference. More presentations, slides, group photo are coming later.

Sightseeing in Belgrade with Ivan, Gábor and Simon

In Serbia I took part at many nice talks. Maybe the best one, Alfred Wassermann’s new project Sketchometry was a real joy to see. The beta version already recognizes several gestures from the user, both by mouse on a PC or fingers on a tablet. By clicking the + sign on the bottom right, one can start to try this free product on ones own very quickly. Alfred confessed that the first minute was usually a bad experience for some users, but after then the usage became really intuitive and joyful. Anyway, this is really cool, as Gábor (the lead web developer at GeoGebra) mentioned after the introductory talk.

Sketchometry uses JSXGraph as its underlying DGS, and also Darko Drakulic, a contributor of GeoGebra in developing a numerical method for locus line visualization for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2011, wrote a nice frontend for it, and gave a talk about his development at the conference. JSXGraph, Wassermann’s main project in the recent years, seems to be a reliable backend for such lightweight GUIs. This is an important issue for smartphones, and at GeoGebra we also plan to reduce the application size as much as possible.

So, I’m back in Austria now, but the life did not stop here, either. Our fresh GSoC 2012 student, Damien Desfontaines did very good improvements on the area method for the OpenGeoProver subsystem. Now his brand new prover is capable of proving 18 theorems or statements from the 44 test cases. This result is remarkable enough if we consider his age (Damien is 19 years old!), the time he spent with the implementation (not more than 3 weeks), and that his work gives far the fastest computation for Desargues’s theorem (142 milliseconds).

Visit the official conference website for more information. There are two weeks left till the registration closes. Look at the poster below and join us if you live nearby or plan to go to the ICME.

Deadlines

• 1 July, 2012: Submission of presentation or poster abstracts (max 200 words)
• 1 July, 2012: Registration

Please use the registration form if you plan to be there with us.

All the participants of the conference are going to get the following special limited edition t-shirt:

Are we going to meet in Korea? Please share the information about the conference. Let your colleges, friends know about the GeoGebra conference in Korea. You can use the poster, or just link to this post or directly to the conference website.

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.