You know yourself how good GeoGebra is, and so do the millions of users. But we are trying to go further. We wish to collect hard evidence on the impact of GeoGebra.

This may come from activities you have undertaken or that you know of, for example:

• Best practice examples: lesson plans and evaluation
• User quotes
• Controlled studies
• Statistical evidence
• Academic/journal or conference articles

In return for sharing with us, we will feature your work in GeoGebra blog posts, in a PREZI presentation GeoGebra STEM – Impact and Evidence, a joint academic presentation…and last but not least the US Mid-West GeoGebra journal.

To get the ball rolling, based on a quick Google search, we have already found evidence which you can see on:

But this is just a start – we want to collect better and better evidence showing the impact of GeoGebra! Please send your information – lesson plans/research articles/studies/links etc to this e-mail address, with the subject line: EVIDENCE: institutes@GeoGebra.org

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

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:

1. Can you improve the plan? What kind of improvements are you suggesting?
2. Do you envision alternative plans that would rely on the GeoGebra community?
3. 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:

1. Official start of the discussions on the site: January 1, 2013.
2. Official announcement of the competition: February 1, 2013.
3. Submission of courses on acoustics: April 30, 2013.
4. 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.

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: