{"id":1966,"date":"2011-07-08T09:28:32","date_gmt":"2011-07-08T13:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/?p=1966"},"modified":"2012-09-27T10:39:03","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T14:39:03","slug":"math4mobile-design-implementation-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/affordable-technology\/math4mobile-design-implementation-challenges\/","title":{"rendered":"Math4Mobile: Design & Implementation Challenges"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Calls are frequently heard for improving schooling by closing the gap between children\u2019s life out-of-school and traditional learning styles, and by broadening the space and span for life-long learning opportunities. The Math4Mobile<\/a> development endeavors to engage all students with mathematical ideas. It provides a collection of tools that could be included in a variety of activities to support students’ mathematical skills, conceptual understanding, and creative mathematical thinking. <\/p>\n

Computerized tools have been shown to provide important support for achieving these goals. Three decades of using technology in mathematics education provide clear evidence that the tools designed to support a well-defined educational agenda were the most successful ones. In general, technology achieves its most important gains in settings in which it is available for long periods of time, and when it is designed to be incorporated regularly into the learning process. I suspect that an important reason for the slow pace of change in this area is that ubiquitous, long-term access to technology is yet to be achieved in most learning environments. <\/p>\n

Given the high rate of increase in the number of mobile phone owners worldwide, the computational capability of most phones, and the widely available communication infrastructure, we have been looking for ways to turn the available and relatively cheap personal mobile technology into a relevant learning tool in and out of school. <\/p>\n

Meeting the challenges of computation, communication, and usability<\/b><\/p>\n

Understanding the computing potential:<\/u> The Math4Mobile project has been developed based on VisualMath<\/a>, which was found to be a successful technology-based curriculum for changing the ways students learn geometry, function-based school algebra, and calculus. The Math4Mobile project started as yet another cycle of development of already existing WEB tools, but working under the constraints of the new hardware and enablers has led us to ideas and challenges beyond hardware-related problems. To support cognitive empowerment for the learning of mathematical content, our first challenge was to plan a variety of well-recognized useful applications. Design decisions were to focus on: <\/p>\n

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  1. Applications that have already been recognized as successful in using technology for learning: Graph2Go<\/a>, a graphing calculator that serves a wide range of users at different levels and in various fields of learning; Quad2Go<\/a>, a dynamic geometry environment that allows constructing and analyzing while dynamically changing the various available quadrilaterals, mostly supporting primary school geometry. <\/li>\n
  2. Applications that could be useful in motivating learning out of the classroom: Sketch2Go<\/a> and Fit2Go<\/a>, which support recording and mathematically analyzing temporal processes that students might face in a task out of class. <\/li>\n
  3. Design applications supporting scientific inquiry; all applications designed to include embedded feedback in a variety of representations, to encourage observation of multiple examples, and at the same time to support the development of mathematical skills through intensive practice (for example, Solve2Go<\/a>). <\/li>\n
  4. Applications that first and foremost can be easily operated \u201con the go,\u201d with a numeric keypad being the only necessary requirement, although navigation keys can also be used. Because typing mathematical signs and expressions can be extremely tedious, our design strategy is to provide ready to work but easy to alter<\/I> mathematical objects such as expression or equation clusters, iconic graphs, geometric shapes, etc. <\/li>\n
  5. Applications that are appropriate to use by children and that comply with hardware, resources, and infrastructure constrains. Our intention is to develop for everyone, closing rather than widening the social gaps in the process. Thus, we plan for minimal air time and the lowest possible end, and for widely used hardware that does not require compromising on essential learning goals. We chose J2ME as the development language because it supports the visual mathematical representations assumed to be essential for conceptual learning and design that works for users of small screens. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Understanding the communication potential:<\/u> According to social-cultural theories of learning, collaborative thinking is an essential component of scientific inquiry. Whereas the social studies and humanities are better known for providing opportunities for sharing, mathematics is assumed to be practiced and developed individually. The choice of mobile phones provides an opportunity to create incentives for collaboration that are authentic learning processes for a community of math learners at all levels. We examine designs of three types of communication: <\/p>\n

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    1. Each Math4Mobile application includes Phone 2 Phone collaboration via SMS center. Students can use it to share their work, post it to receive critical comments from their peers, analyze and propose improvements of others\u2019 work, and submit their work to the teacher. <\/li>\n
    2. We identified two challenges for our future development work: multi-user communication, where users can share their work interactively, and communication between phones and computers. Advancing in this direction, we developed the Click2Go<\/a> Classroom Interaction System, currently piloted in schools. Click2Go allows students to use the local communication infrastructure to respond to teachers\u2019 prompts and present the collated students\u2019 responses to promote whole-group discussion.<\/li>\n
    3. \nAnother channel of communication, the Augmented Textbook<\/a>, works with the Math4Mobile application to augment paper textbooks with mobile applications that include interactive diagrams, a counterpart to printed diagrams. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Understanding the Usability Potential: <\/u> Pilot experiments involving teachers in schools and pre-service teachers were part of our development work. In each experiment we designed activities relevant to the curricular agenda. The learning was recorded and analyzed, and usually the results showed the direction of required improvements of the application. After analyzing the learning and teaching opportunities, we design scenarios that can be relevant to the following pedagogical and technological variables:<\/p>\n