 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
THE ROBOTS OF SUMMER Making everyone count It's a silent epidemic. Each year, beginning in ninth grade, a large fraction of the millions of students in the United States begin, quietly, dropping out of the math curriculum. By graduation, only a small number of students in a given class are still taking math. Many leave high school without having passed a course higher than basic algebra -- a serious problem in a national economy increasingly dependent on the development of cutting-edge technologies.  Students program small calculator-based robots to perform simple tasks during a MSTE workshop. The hands-on approach gives students a better understanding of how abstract concepts in mathematics translate into real-world technology. view larger "It's easy for students to say they're bored," says George Reese, director of the Office of Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education (MSTE) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. What may seem to teachers like boredom, argues Reese, often turns out to be something else, as suggested by "math biographies" written by students describing their past experiences in the subject. "Overwhelmingly, people recall two things as being influential in their view of mathematics: a teacher and a test. Positive or negative, there was some test that was really traumatic or some teacher who really made them unhappy, who really made math a miserable experience and turned them off." As a veteran mathematics teacher himself, Reese's mission is to find ways to turn such students back on to mathematics. "I don't have to be an English major to love Shakespeare," he says. "On the other hand, with mathematics, there's very much this sense that it's "owned" by the elite; that nobody else is entitled to it unless they can pass a test. If literature is for everyone, why not math?" Why not math, indeed? Sponsored by TRECC, MSTE's Summer Math program targets students in the DuPage area who have been "filtered out of the math pipeline" -- and shows that they belong back in that pipeline, after all. The robots of summer Every summer for two weeks, Reese, along with graduate students and undergraduate math education majors from the University of Illinois, meets for two weeks with high school math students. Students come from the Technology Center of DuPage, Champaign Central High School's "Academy," and other schools around Illinois to learn math -- without worksheets or homework. Instead, they learn advanced mathematical concepts through hands-on experience. For a typical lesson, students might take hand-held global positioning devices out into a nearby park and use latitude and longitude measurements to calculate the earth's circumference. They might float penny boats in a pool of water to learn about dynamical geometry systems. Students might apply Euclidean geometry to artificial intelligence technology by programming small robots with algorithms which move the robot in a geometric pattern such as a right triangle or a circle. Reese has found that the approach of combining mathematics with real, observable technology, however basic, can help even the youngest students learn and extrapolate abstract math concepts that some adults may find hard to grasp. "For example, you can give a fourth-grade kid a graphing calculator connected to a distance sensor. You can ask them to generate a graph showing time versus distance, and then, using the sensor, they can figure out what the relationship is between time and distance. The graph is created in real time as they're moving." At first, says Reese, the students will "move left to right, even though that has no effect on the distance." Soon, however, as they find that they can alter the shape of the curve by speeding up or slowing down, "they're learning on a kinesthetic level and on a foundational level what a function is."  An engineer from Boeing, a sponsor of Summer Math 2003, talks to students about robotics. view larger Given a "loop-de-loop," says Reese, "even an elementary school student, after playing with the sensors, will say, 'Well, this is impossible, because you can't go back in time.' Whereas I've seen all kinds of adults -- people who have passed lots of math classes -- make lots of the same mistakes that the elementary school students made at first." Grounding abstract concepts in real-world technology, Reese explains, gives students a set of foundational experiences on which to build their understanding of math. The lack of such a foundation, he believes, is the reason why math skills slip away from most people so easily. "It doesn't have to be something that you use every day. But there have to be ways to teach these concepts that feel real. Moving with a distance sensor -- that's the same technology that's being used to open doors automatically -- how does it know you're coming?.If we use those same tools to teach the concept of function of distance-time relationship, it feels more authentic [to students] than just talking about functions in algebra class." MSTE Resources  Mikkel Storaasli, head of the mathematics department at Leyden High School in DuPage County, demonstrates a calculator-based robot. view larger What is particularly remarkable is the way that MSTE makes use of the resources it has at hand. The MSTE website is enormously popular. Getting over 1.75 million hits per month, it functions as an online clearinghouse for educational math, science, and technology resources for teachers. To provide a successful Summer Math program, Reese also draws on the talents and efforts of a varied group of part-time clerical staff and largely volunteer graduate students, preservice and student teachers, and an ever-growing network of teachers throughout Illinois and the nation. "We're a bunch of 'educational hackers,' I think, and 'hackers' in the best sense of that word," Reese says, half-jokingly. "Whatever we have, we find tools to make it work, and we'll leverage all kinds of things." However, he says, the support that TRECC has provided has been vital to MSTE's efforts to find ways to keep students "in the math pipeline." "TRECC's support has given us the forum to conduct our research and some of the resources that we've needed to get the word out about the work we're doing." "Dr. Reese should be applauded for his grass-roots efforts to continually reach out to students who have been turned off by math in the past and fire them up," says Nancy Komlanc, TRECC's education and training coordinator. "These students are as much a part of the future workforce as those who will continue taking math throughout their college years." Return to July 2004 Newslink Table of Contents
|
|
|||
|
|
|
||||
