In our country, one of the important concepts proposed by the recent curricula has been 'activities' since 2005. From this point of view, both mathematics educators and teachers should focus on and discuss about the importance of activities. This study is designed to examine pre-service secondary mathematics teachers' (PSMTs) perceptions about mathematics learning activities (MLA). Participants are twenty-seven PSMTs. The data include 3 different groups. The first group consists of PSMTs' free writings that describe their definitions of MLA. The second group consists of observation notes of the class discussions which are related to the structure of MLA and MLA's required properties. The last one consists of MLA samples that were designed by PSMTs. In consequence of data analysis, results show that PSMTs did not reach consensus on a unique definition or particular properties of MLA; the definitions spreaded out a broad perspective. PSMTs defined the activity as the classroom application that is connected with real life and other disciplines, compatible with the objectives in teaching programs, is designed to improve students' cognitive skills, student-centered, interesting, easy to learn, and appropriate for groupwork. But, it is found out that PSMTs did not reflect the properties of MLA while they were designing the activities. The results of the study indicated that PSMTs' perceptions of activities and their skills of designing an activity must be improved.
To many people, establishing relationships between mathematics and art is difficult or surprising. However, these two disciplines are quite interrelated. Today, the literature of mathematics reveals that there has been an increasing interest in interaction between these two disciplines. As also observed in our country, the studies on relationships between mathematics and art have gained more popularity in mathematics education. There is a course entitled, "Mathematics and Art" offered as one of elective courses and taught for ten years to juniors of the
There have recently been many simulation tools developed by researchers for observing the dynamics of biochemical networks. These tools have mainly designed for the stochastic and deterministic simulations and some of them also support the inference of the model parameters under deterministic modellings. Therefore, they are known as the simulation softwares for biochemical systems. Although these tools aim the same purpose in the application, they have their own advantages and disadvantages. Hereby, in this study, to help the users for choosing the most suitable simulation tools for their purposes, we initially present the widely implemented ones, namely, Cellware, COPASI, Dizzy, Dynetica, E-CELL, GENESIS, Jarnac/JDesigner, Systems Biology Toolbox and Virtual Cellsoftwares, and then, compare them according to our selected attributes. For the comparison criteria, we define the theme, user-friendliness, platforms supported, language of the software, capacity in the simulation, inference, visualization and the Systems Biology Markup Language. Finally, we suggest certain tools for academic and non-academic users by taking into account their plausible major attributes for the selection.
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