Math Tools Discussions on Problems of the Week
Using Java Applet Technology

Join us!

The Math Tools discussions about three problems of the week using Java applet technology or tPoWs started on Friday, November 21, 2003. Please feel free to respond to any of the posts that you'll find in these threads:

• Discussions for "The Hispaniola Water Shortage" tool
• Discussions for "Galactic Exchange" tool
• Discussions for "Scale N' Pop" tool

Why are we having this discussion?

A group at the Math Forum is studying students' planning and strategy use in their work with technology-rich non-routine challenge problems. We are building on the research that was written and discussed for The Math Forum's Bridging Research and Practice videopaper and we're focusing on these related questions:

1. What do we want the students to learn?
2. How do we know they have learned it?
3. What do we do when some do not learn it?

We're also interested in what makes the online environment a unique and useful environment in which to learn. This week students in this class have been working first with pencil and paper to solve 3 different applet-enhanced problems - ESCOTPoWs on The Math Forum site. Then, they work with the problems as online problems. Our thought was to observe if this would help students work with the online problem more effectively.