How do we teach children to express and communicate ideas in a formal and informal mode? What type of language do they need in a concrete context? How should they determine a proper level of formalization of their descriptions? In an attempt to explore these issues we carried out a pilot experiment in the frames of the DALEST European project whose goal was to create environment for stimulating the 3D geometry understanding of young students and to assist them in developing some fundamental mathematical skills including spatial visualization and articulating ideas. The pilot experiment was carried out with 5th graders from five Bulgarian schools by means of specially designed educational scenarios and the Cubix Editor (a Logo based application for manipulating unit-sized cubes). The children were given tasks to describe compositions of unit-sized cubes and to build such compositions by means of the Cubix Editor when given their descriptions by peers. The students experienced the whole process of generating a good description -becoming aware of the ambiguity, producing counterexamples, reducing the ambiguity, eliminating the redundancy.The pilot experiment aimed at specifying the structure, scope and methods behind the stereometry activities envisaged for 5th graders in the frames of the DALEST project.The first impressions confirm our belief that the language is playing significant role in the learning experiences of the students, that the relationship between thoughts and words involves back and forth reshaping process. While constructing and describing cubical structures they articulated their own ideas, developed concepts collaboratively with others, moved between everyday and mathematical terms, between procedural and declarative style, exploring the boundaries of understanding.
The problems of practical importance which are considered in school today necessarily have to lead to a mathematical model that can be solved by school mathematics knowledge. This includes systems of equations of at most second degree, some simple trigonometry and/or some basic geometry.This restricts severely the class of such problems and conveys theimpression that mathematics is not applicable enough. We provide examples ofproblems related to practice which are difficult to solve by means of traditional schoolmathematics but are amenable for solving (at least with a certain precision) with the use of software systems dealing with mathematical problems.We also present the results of an experiment with such problems that were given toschool students participating in the second round of the competition “VIVA Mathematics with Computer”.ACM Computing Classification System (1998): K.3.1.
The results of a survey on satisfaction and fatigue of teachers, students and parents from the distance learning preparation and the first week of its conduction are presented. Distance learning was introduced by the Ministry of Education on March 16, 2020 in connection with the state of emergency announced by a decision of the National Assembly of Bulgaria of March 13, 2020, related to the COVID
19 pandemic. The purpose of the survey is to improve the next stages of distance learning by taking into account the experience of its participants (teachers, parents, students).
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