“KWARC was!”

Theme: Student can build up their own mathematical knowledge, starting with meaningful problems instead of learning algorithms and theories without connection to prior knowledge.

Mathematical Software (Java Applets) for children and secondary school students. For example to teach addition rather then counting objects. They aim at making applications more user friendly by implementing small tools, which only cover one topic, and have self-explaining interfaces.

Presentation by Peter Boon, Freudenthal Institute University of Utrecht (Education Software Designer)
at the 4th European Workshop on Mathematical & Science eContents

More Details

Applying an Incremental Approach: From small exercises towards an online curriculum
* organizing activities
* capturing students’ work
* customizing the activities to make it fit in learning resources
* more authoring facilities to generate digital activities with less effort
* digital learning trajectories instead of single activities

Notes on my Discussion with Peter Boon
(Please not all the below is my personal opinion and understanding of Peter’s explanations.)

The DME can be used to create applets of interactive problems. Peter showed me how to export these and how they can be easily integrated in an HTML page. We could use DME to make our precourse system more interactive and interesting for our students. However, DME is not open source, but for schools and university a rather small amount is charged. The DME system is fully web-based and available online. I’d be happy to give a demo in one of our group meetings.

In contrast to MathDox, DME is a client-based application, i.e. all computation is done on the client allowing for large number of users. However, database access are of course still on the server side. MathDox (Jelly) and our system (PHP) are server-side implementation, i.e. all computation is taken place on the server – multiple user access at the same time might become a problem. However, our system is not used in the classroom but is an additional discussion platform next to the course. Multiple access to the same time is less likely.

Portability of DME across operation systems is not a problem (in contrast to us who have to consider different Browser specialities, DME is JAVA-based and thus has less problems to support different browsers, however there are some issues on running it on Mac).

DME allows to create problems only, no complete course materials. These problems can be exchanged between teachers of one school. Peter is working on allowing an exchange across schools.

BTW: Setting up a central repository for mathematical eLearning content seems a very interesting challenge. During the discussion with Peter, I got a much better idea how this repository is different from our understanding. So far we have been focusing on rather “dead” mathematical materials. We aim at making these more active, by e.g. allowing flexible elisions and dynamic notations. However, these documents are still not interactive in the understanding of the eLearning community. Here interactive problems include e.g. the applets Peter Boon generates, i.e. content that includes user-specific (interaction) data. In this sense, active content can be understood as forms that need to get and set user data via and interface of an eLearning environment (which stores the user data in its database).

In the SCORM context these interactive contents are managed by the SCORM runtime environment, which handles the communication between interactive context and an eLearning environment. We need to distinguish between content providers and system designers. Content providers do not want to know about the details of an eLearning environment (such as Moodle or DME) but simply want to provide their content. These contents are only able to call a standardized API of an eLearning environment. They get and set user-specific data via this API. In particular the user-specific data is transferred as text. The interactive content can decode and encode these text files and e.g. initialize its applet. In constrast, the eLearning environment generates the text file from its database.

Providing a central repository for these eLearning contents seems challenging but really interesting. A very interesting conversion. Thank you!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under Conferences, MSeC2008, cmueller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.