Web-based Mathematics Education Pilot Project

The Web-based Mathematics Education (WME) framework aims to create a Web for mathematics education where education content and support services are interoperable on the Web and can be created, deployed, and maintained on a distributed basis. To test the feasibility, practicality, and effectiveness of WME as a way to enhance mathematics education in schools, a pilot project at Kimpton Middle School (Munroe Falls, Ohio) has been launched. The pilot generated positive feedback from students and teachers. Described are the WME approach, the pilot website, teaching experiments with 7th grade students, lessons learned, and future plans. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Web-based learning can extend the reach of education and significantly broaden its impact and influence. Given the state of mathematics education in the United States and other countries, an effective way to deliver and enhance mathematics education via the Web holds much promise. While various methods have been used to display mathematical formulas in Web pages and to make simple mathematical computations accessible via CGI programs or X Windows [12], a general and effective system for accessing, producing, and delivering mathematical content is still the subject of research and development. Investigators at the W3 Consortium (W3C) and elsewhere are working to make publishing mathematical materials on the Web easy. MathML [14] is an XML application for markup of mathematical expressions that supports both presentation encoding (display layout) and content encoding (computation semantics). The IBM digital publishing group has released the experimental Techexplorer [11], a Web browser plug-in that dynamically formats and displays documents containing scientific and mathematical expressions coded in TeX/LaTeX. Some MathML are also supported. Techexplorer also allows a user to send expressions to a fixed compute server for evaluation. MathType [18], from Design Science Inc., supports interactive creation of mathematical notations for Web pages and documents. The same company also offers WebEQ [18] that provides a Java applet to display WebTeX and MathML in a browser. The W3C Amaya Web browser demonstrates a prototype implementation of MathML which allows users to browse and edit Web pages containing mathematical expressions [17]. Together with the rest of the Web page, these expressions are manipulated through a visual interface. Netscape 7.1 offers native support for MathML provided that the required fonts are installed. The increasing acceptance and software support for MathML were evident at recent MathML International Conferences [15]. Mathematical content viewing on a Web page is static. On the Internet, end-users, especially educational applications, can make good use of dynamic access to mathematical computing. “Internet Accessible Mathematical Computation” [6] has been the subject of the IAMC Workshops that underscore the on-going interest in making mathematical information and computation easily available in the new communication age [5, 9]. For more background and related activities, please refer to the Proceedings of the IAMC Workshops [10], and the IAMC homepage [13]. Researchers have begun to make attempts to deliver mathematical education materials over the Web/Internet. Already, we can find many Web sites providing courses and tools for mathematics education. Such sites include WIMS, Livemath, Mathwright, WebMathematica, Calc101, AcitveMath, Maple, and MathWeb. Linda Beccerra [1] gave a good summary of Web tools for interactive computation. Please refer to the website icm.mcs.kent.edu/research/wme.html for more background information. Generally, ad hoc server-side programming is made to support a narrowly defined set of topics. Authoring educational content within the scope is awkward, and outside of the scope is almost impossible without substantial new back-end Web programming. The most serious flaw of such ad hoc approaches is that the components, content pages, and server-side programs do not combine to form a larger system within which to interoperate and to mutually reinforce. In 2001, our group at the Institute for Computational Mathematics (ICM/Kent), together with collaborators, began research on the Web-based Mathematics Education (WME) framework [7]. Starting in January 2004, Ohio Board of Regents (OBR) Research Challenge funding provided for a pilot project to put WME to trial at Kimpton Middle School. An overview of the technical aspects of WME is given first. The discussion will then focus on the pilot project.