Workshop

Using Technology To Teach/Learn Mathematics, How Are We As Teachers Fostering Mathematics Education Mobility?

(Workshop at the SEFI Annual Conference)

SEFI is the European Society for Engineering Education, the biggest network for engineering education in Europe. Around since 1973, it brings together schools, profs, students, and companies all focused on making engineering education better and more visible.

More than 30 teachers and researchers participated in the workshop. We collected data from 29 attendees from the following institutions:

University/Institution Country
IPC/ISEC Portugal
Tec de Monterrey México
UVAQ Mexico
Saxion University of Applied Science The Netherlands
The University of Texas at San Antonio United States
FHNW School of Life Sciences Switzerland
Universidad de Salamanca Spain
Saxion University of Applied Sciences Netherlands
Technical university Eindhoven Netherlands
Maastricht University Netherlands
TU Dublin Ireland
University of Texas at El Paso Usa
Széchenyi University Hungary
CSIC Spain
Chalmers Sweden
Tallinn University of Technology Estonia
KU Leuven Belgium
NTNU Norway
Norwegian University of Science and Technology Norway
RWTH Aachen Germany
University of Cape Town South Africa
University of Maine United States
University of Twente The Netherlands
Mt San Antonio College United States

From these participants 58.6% were female and 41.4% male.
Their teaching experience is diverse (in years):

They selected different methodologies that they have used during their classes:

The main difficulties when overcoming traditional pencil and paper classes are represented in the following graph:

The use and purposes of ICT tools:

Students’ feedback on the use of at least one of the ICT tools mentioned above:

We asked them to order (1-less important, 5-most important) the following actions: to solve the problem, being critic about the solution obtained, communicate the solution with rigour, being able to apply the knowledge obtained in a different situation, being able to apply ICT tools, being able to translate the problem into daily life language and vice-versa.

They shared some fruitful educational experiences with us: pedagogy, ICT tools used, assessment procedures, …

  • Using Padlet in laboratory classes
  • Integration Competition
  • Vevox for class engagement, Brightspace for notes and assignment uploads. Regular communication
  • Escape room for review, mindmap with the different topics
  • Workshops with students using challenges and experiments as a way to foster thinking and stimulate interest demonstrating that science (stem) can be funny
  • Using Geogebra for dynamic illustration is simple and worthwhile.
  • Individually collected data analysis team-project in Ststistics course.
  • My students have been using Jupyter notebooks for image processing, where concepts of linear algebra are treated.
  • Creating/updating activities/tasks that were used for in person teaching to a virtual teaching could be one aspect that we should focus in using Technology in mathematics education.
  • Discussing language models and how they relate to conditional probability, and having students start google searches and discuss why Google proposes different next words for us
  • Not mine but simple and still beautiful work of some colleagues: «Algorithmic Battle». Students team up against each other developing algorithms for hard combinatorial problems and instance generators to generate tricky instances.
  • Peer assessment
  • Students don’t mind to be prompted with questions as long as grade not affected
  • Servicie Leaming
  • Through collaboration with the engineering department, we created an integrated lab component to the course involving a mix of numerical methods and experimental data. As an example, we use a beam deflection lab to have students measure the system’s Green function.
  • The use of Polya’s 4 step method to encourage students to be critical of their own answers of those of others proved to work really well for me in a high school context