MobiMaths: An approach to utilising smartphones in teaching mathematics
Mlearn2010 - 9th world conference on mobile and contextual learning, page 9-16. (October 2010)Abstract
The teaching of mathematics at second level is well known to be a
challenging issue. An overemphasis on didactic teaching, lack of
encouragement to explore possible alternative solutions to
problems, an overemphasis on procedure and the separation of
mathematical procedures from real world problems are just some
of the factors which are put forward as contributing to the
difficulties in math education. Through its inherent ability to
support collaboration, and contextualised learning, mobile
technology offers the potential to address at least some of the
issues in mathematics education. This paper describes the
approach we are following to create a set of tools, learning
applications and teacher supports, which exploit smartphone
technology to aid in the teaching and learning of mathematics.
The work is underpinned by a social constructivist pedagogy with
an emphasis on collaborative problem solving and the
contextualisation of learning. This paper discusses issues in
mathematics education before going on to describe the broad
approach being followed in our research. The underlying technical
architecture is described along with the first two activities we
have developed. The preliminary results from a user evaluation
study are reported upon.