The project Math Exercises for You 3 aims to increase the mathematical skills of secondary school students and provide teachers with materials and tools to increase students' interest, activate students’ thinking efforts, and enliven tuition. Currently, teachers and students have a huge amount of materials available in printed and electronic form. However, it is not easy to find a platform that includes materials for all parts of the tuition process (motivation, applications, practice, competitions and games,...) in sufficient quantity and scope for the whole secondary school curriculum. The project has the ambitious goal of creating a comprehensive platform where students and teachers will find materials for almost all parts of secondary school mathematics education. In doing so, the project builds on the Erasmus+ funded Math Exercises for You 1 and 2 projects (2016-2019, 2019-2022). The output of these projects is the five-language portal math4u.vsb.cz, which has had 107,000 users over the last three years and has won a number of awards (LABEL 2020, eLearning 2021 award).
The project wants to expand the existing portal in terms of both content and teaching aids. In terms of content, we will create:
- worked-out math application examples that foster intrinsic motivation to learn,
- "Find a Mistake" questions (problems) that help to understand the nature of the solution, educate for mathematical thinking and promote the ability to decide on the truth of the statements presented, and
- a large number of online Training Games to consistently and systematically reinforce basic knowledge and skills.
In the area of teaching aids, we will create templates of competitions and games for teachers to fill with questions from a prepared database, thus strongly personalizing the content for specific groups of students. Competition apps that run on smartphones, tablets and computers will enliven lessons and home practice to foster student interest, competitiveness, and many other competencies, including digital ones. These new web applications will open new possibilities for teaching mathematics in harmony with the Digital Education Action Plan.
Multilingualism is an important feature of the portal. The entire portal, all applications, motivational examples and the entire database of questions and problems will be available in five languages (English, Spanish, Czech, Slovak, and Polish). That is to help teachers support CLIL and help students develop mathematical language skills. Then, language knowledge opens the way for students to study at universities abroad. Further, it supports increased interest in mathematics and the study of STEM subjects.
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 studying 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 team consists of partners from three countries. A team from the Czech Republic is composed of the project coordinator - VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Mendel University in Brno and two secondary schools. The other partners are the secondary school from Slovakia and the association of secondary schools from Poland.
Home page: https://math4u.vsb.cz/
Project Coordinator
- Department of Applied Mathematics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Czechia, www.am.vsb.cz (Contact person: Petr Beremlijski, petr.beremlijski@vsb.cz, math4u@vsb.cz)
Partners
- Grammar School, Ostrava-Hrabůvka, Ostrava, Czechia, http://www.ghrabuvka.cz
- Grammar school Hladnov and state language school, Ostrava, Czechia http://hladnov.info/
- Grammar School of Viliam Pauliny-Tóth, Martin, Slovakia, https://gvpt.sk/
- Mendel University in Brno, Brno, Czechia, https://www.mendelu.cz/
- Zespół Szkół w Lipnicy Wielkiej (The association of schools in Lipnica Wielka), Lipnica Wielka, Poland, https://zslipnicawielka.pl/
Programme: Erasmus+
Action Type: Cooperation partnerships in school education
Identifier: 2022-1-CZ01-KA220-SCH-000086821
Start Date: 01-09-2022
End Date: 31-08-2025