Making maths fun in the classroom

Using computers to explore maths concepts helps students to understand ideas more quickly and makes maths more engaging.

For his PhD, Waikato University researcher and lecturer Dr Nigel Calder studied a group of 10-year-olds in Tauranga schools and another group of pre-service or trainee teachers using computers to investigate maths problems.

Dr Calder monitored the way students learn in the medium as they worked with spreadsheets, graphs, charts, and even computer games.

“The computer makes solving problems and investigating situations so much quicker,” says Dr Calder who teaches pre-service teachers at the Waikato University campus in Tauranga.

“It highlights the relationships between visual and abstract maths concepts. You can change a figure on a spreadsheet and immediately the computer picks up the change and makes the alteration to a graph,” he says.

“Children can manage large amounts of data and get instantaneous feedback.

“Computers make it so much easier to answer ‘what if’ questions, so they can look at patterns, key in what they think might happen and look at the relationship between different models of the same data. That sort of investigation might take ages using pen and paper and trawling through masses of figures.

“Sometimes the students found it did something completely unexpected and this motivated them to investigate further or look at things from a fresh perspective.”

Dr Calder says the 10-year-olds liked the immediate feedback and quickly picked up concepts and made connections with this highly visual way of learning.  And he says working round a screen also helped them to work collaboratively, discussing and building on ideas –  more fun than working solo with a maths book.

He did find the 10-year-olds were sometimes more motivated and enthusiastic than the trainee teachers to use ICT for learning maths – a number of the trainees found the computer threatening. But as Dr Calder teaches these people how to teach maths, it’s his job to make them feel comfortable in what’s likely to become a much more common feature of the maths classroom.

“There is a real push going on to make maths more interesting and meaningful, to teach it in context, and for students to develop personal understanding and strategies.

“It makes perfect sense, but teachers are also under pressure to get through the curriculum and so it’s a matter of getting the balance – finding out what students know and what they need to know to move on, and that often means more individual learning pathways.”

Using computers, in conjunction with mental strategies, can enhance the learning process and make some concepts more accessible, he says.

Dr Calder is currently part of a team from the Centre for Science and Technology Education Research, a unit based at the University of Waikato, working with pupils at Tahatai Coast School in the Bay of Plenty.

Pupils at Tahatai are using Apple Computers and working with what’s called Scratch, a programme to develop their own computer programs to problem solve and explore mathematical ideas.