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: The Problem of the Week (PoW?) service managed by the Math Forum at Drexel University targets students in grades three through twelve. These problems are designed to provide “creative, non-routine challenges” for volunteers around the globe. The current PoW? service is divided into 4 separate branches under titles Algebra, Geometry, Pre-Algebra and Math Fundamentals. In every two weeks a new problem is advertised on the Mathforum’s web page under each title, and the participants are asked to submit their solutions until the new question is online. After the deadline, the solution is made public and a new problem is posted. Each submitted solution gets a feedback from a Math Forum mentor. |
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: The Problem of the Week (Pow) service managed by the Math Forum at Drexel University targets students in grades three through twelve. These problems are designed to provide “creative, non-routine challenges” for volunteers around the globe. The current Pow service is divided into 4 separate branches under the titles: Algebra, Geometry, Pre-Algebra and Math Fundamentals. Every two weeks a new problem is advertized on the Math Forum’s web page under each title, and the participants are asked to submit their solutions until the new question is online. After the deadline, the solution is made public and a new problem is posted. Each submitted solution gets feedback from a Math Forum mentor. |
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: The PoW?-wow service is an experimental extension of the regular PoW? service that aims to provide an opportunity for participants to collaboratively discuss PoWs? with their peers. From our perspective, the main goal of this service is to observe how students discuss mathematics in small groups with minimal software support. Due to its popularity, AOL’s Instant Messenger software was chosen to support our synchronous experimental environment. Two one-hour PoW?-wow sessions were held twice a week. For each of these sessions we used questions from Algebra and Geometry branches interchangeably. A VMT project member facilitated and logged each session, without (usually) interfering with the mathematical discussion. We neither followed a certain strategy while forming our online groups, nor imposed some sort of structure such as member role assignments etc. Since the attendance was usually low for each session, in almost all cases the number of participants was just enough to form a single group. |
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: The PoW?-wow service is an experimental extension of the regular Pow service that aims to provide an opportunity for participants to collaboratively discuss Pows with their peers. From our research perspective, the main goal of this service is to observe how students discuss mathematics in small groups with minimal software support. Due to its popularity, AOL’s Instant Messenger software was chosen to initially support our synchronous experimental environment. Two one-hour Pow-wow sessions were held each week. For each of these sessions we used questions from Algebra and Geometry branches interchangeably. A VMT project member facilitated and logged each session, without (usually) interfering with the mathematical discussion. We neither followed a strategy while forming our online groups, nor imposed some sort of structure such as member role assignments. Since the attendance was usually low for each session, in almost all cases the number of participants was just enough to form a single group. |
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: In order to collect information about our users we surveyed them twice before and after each session. The first questionnaire was attached to the registration form and was aimed to compile age, gender, and grade information. In addition to this, the initial questionnaire also contained self-assessment type questions regarding the participant’s math and technical skills. At the end of each session we asked general questions about their collaborative experience to see whether each participant thought they benefited from the activity. |
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: In order to collect information about our users we surveyed them twice, before and after each session. The first questionnaire was attached to the registration form and was aimed to compile age, gender, and grade information. In addition to this, the initial questionnaire also contained self-assessment type questions regarding the participant’s math and technical skills. At the end of each session we asked general questions about their collaborative experience to see whether each participant thought they benefited from the activity. |
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: Each participant usually writes up and submits his/her own solution to the corresponding PoW? every week. Since PoW?-wow is an extension of the PoW? service, we also have access to individual solutions articulated by each student after the synchronous session. This information could be possibly used together with an analysis of group discourse in an effort to observe the effect of collaboration over participants. |
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: Each participant usually writes up and submits his/her own solution to the corresponding Pow every week. Since Pow-wow is an extension of the Pow service, we also have access to individual solutions articulated by each student after the synchronous session. This information could be possibly used together with an analysis of group discourse in an effort to observe the effect of collaboration over participants. |
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: After holding 19 PoW?-wow sessions we have been able to form a reasonable collection of user profile and mathematical discourse data. This data will be very useful in improving our understanding about how collaboration works in our setting and what sort of software support we need in order to support collaboration. We are still in the process of analyzing this data by using our recently developed coding scheme. |
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: After holding 19 Pow-wow sessions we have been able to form a reasonable collection of user profiles and mathematical discourse data. This data will be very useful in improving our understanding about how collaboration works in our setting and what sort of software support we need in order to support collaboration. We are still in the process of analyzing this data using our recently developed coding scheme. |
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