MATH4U

MATH4U

Mathematics is one of the pillars of technical and science education. Unfortunately, it is also considered to be one of the main annoyances in education today. This could be also the reason why young people avoid to study STEM disciplines. Attractive and modern online materials for teaching and learning mathematics can improve this situation and increase interest in this beautiful and useful discipline.

The project Math Exercises for You 2 has three main goals. The first one is to increase the mathematical competencies of secondary school students and the pupils in the last years of elementary schools. We intend brighten teaching of mathematics up with interesting and original interactive materials for practising the curriculum.  Strengthening mathematical knowledge and skills leads to higher self-confidence not only in mathematics but also in other science disciplines.

The second goal is to improve the quality of the teaching process, to connect the work of the teachers and students more closely. We suppose to improve the efficiency of the work of the teachers when preparing interesting exercises and exam. We provide a framework for obtaining information on the difficult parts of the curriculum and the achievements of the students and the classes.

The third goal of the project is to enable students and teachers to improve mathematical English and Spanish as their foreign language. This goal will be achieved by the fact that all the web applications and the materials will be available in five languages (English, Spanish, Czech, Polish, Slovak) and the student can easily swap between his native language and the world language. This will help to increase the language skills of both students and teachers.

For the achievement of the goals of the project we are going to create:

  • a new mobile web application «Math for Student Easy» which will be designed to practice mathematical problems while travelling to school. The problems included in this application will be relatively simple and will be solvable without writing down any computation. The application will operate with the database of 1,200 questions.
  • a new web application «Clone written test» designed for preparing exams in several variations by the teachers. The main goal is to allow the teachers to choose questions from a special questions database and use these questions to build a test or exam for a class. Another test with similar questions will be created automatically. Thus, two variants of the same test are created and the teachers are capable to clone their tests with a minimal effort. The cloned test will contain the same type of problems only with minor modifications of the original problems. The application will contain the database of 1,600 questions.
  • a new mobile web application «Interactive math class» that handles 5,000 questions in five languages (EN, ES, CZ, SK, PL). The main motivation is to treat the teaching and learning process as a continuous interaction between the teacher and the student, where the teacher reflects the current state of knowledge and insufficiencies of the students. This allows to adapt the teaching and learning process appropriately. This web application will be focused on classroom work. It will allow teachers to create tests easily, assign them to the students, and get an immediate feedback. With this workflow the students help the teacher to focus on that part of the curriculum which is the main source of difficulties. The efficiency of the teaching project is increased by focusing the teacher’s effort on the suitable parts of the curriculum.

All the web applications created within the project will work on all common operating systems and all common platforms.

We will also focus on other activities such as:

  • Exchange of pupils (the activity contributes to improving the foreign language skills of selected students, who shall thus be able to use plenty of educational material in English and Spanish).
  • Pilot use of project outcomes. Materials will be tested and verified on a sample of 1,000 students.
  • Dissemination. We assume 30,000 visitors of the created web applications during the project. Google Analytics will be used as a measuring tool.

The project team consists of partners from four countries. A team from the Czech Republic is composed of the project coordinator – VSB-Technical University of Ostrava and the three secondary schools. The other partners are two secondary schools from Slovakia and the association of secondary schools from Poland. The last partner is a regional public body from Spain.

Home page: http://math4u.vsb.cz/

Project coordinator

Partners

Programme: Erasmus+

Key Action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Action Type: Strategic Partnerships for school education

Identifier: 2019-1-CZ01-KA201-061222

Start Date: 01-09-2019

End Date: 31-08-2022