| |
| Technology | Monday, September 06, 2010 |
 The MathLearn interactive technology has been researched, developed and tested, over a period of nine years, It consists of two parts:
- Technology for interactive presentation and manipulation
A major advantage for MathLearn is a creative, leading edge format for depicting math issues so that the various math elements can be displayed visually and interactively. This format permits the student to change parameters and numbers and to rapidly understand the impact of the changes. Extensive testing, with various levels of students, has demonstrated that students grasp the complex math elements very rapidly, through these interactive media. The technology is platform independent, written in Java, and executes under either Netscape or Explorer.
This interactive presentation and manipulation technology is a creative breakthrough and is applicable to fields other than mathematics.
- Underlying mathematics content
Mathematical or scientific "engines" have been developed for the different topics to be taught. Using advanced, software-engineering concepts, these "engines" will make it possible to rapidly produce families of products that carry the student forward from level to level in a subject.
The same underlying math can be explained in simple form or in more complex form, at higher levels. The same basic "math engines", for a particular subject, can thus be used to create modules at different levels of education, at grade school, high school, college and graduate levels.
MathLearn supports fully interactive mathematics on the screen – math equations that can be interacted with and are dynamic. MathLearn has developed and tested integrated, specially designed, charting engines, spreadsheet capability, and other supporting libraries. All of MathLearn technology has been designed to teach and to illuminate the mathematical relationships and concepts – not just to execute math in graphing calculators and similar technology.
The MathLearn core technology is approximately 80,000 lines of code and many modules are now in their second version of the second generation. It is no longer a question of wondering what is needed or how it can be done or building the technology that can do it – this has been done. A large body of highly sophisticated, educationally-proven content is available.
Schools using content created with various versions of MathLearn have included MIT, Stanford, Harvard Business School, and the London Business School. Modules have also had live testing and usage at the grade school level. Students and professors report exceptional results. Teachers have frequently stated that, after using these modules, they would not want to teach the same material again without them.
The modules have extremely broad applicability. It is feasible to develop formats that can provide remedial, average and advanced elements for teaching, for measurement of results and for displaying mathematical results, at almost every level and in almost every application. Topics have ranged from electrostatics to forecasting to optics to printed circuit board simulators to inventory simulations to integration and algebra and geometry to models of chemical absorption in the blood stream.
Students have ranged from those in a school for the deaf, some with multiple disorders, at the primary school level, to graduate students at leading universities. Students are not the only beneficiaries. MathLearn’s modules explain very sophisticated issues in simple, intuitive ways that will also be helpful to teachers in improving their math teaching skills and understanding the underlying relationships. Services to teachers are part of the planned consulting and coaching services, discussed below.
Each module will present a series of "scientific" concepts, each accompanied by several illustrations. A great variety of distinct learning modules can be developed from the basic math, for various market segments. For example, an applied statistics module for sociology students vs. an engineering statistics module, could be based on the same math engine.
Since the software is implemented as Java applets, special plug-in software, runtime libraries, and the downloading of software is not required. This approach simplifies use by the student, as well as in distribution, support, and maintenance issues.
| |
