Development of Problem Solving Skills with Maple in Higher Education

Fissore, Cecilia; Marchisio, Marina; Sacchet, Matteo

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-81698-8_15

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…On the other side, there are education systems that mainly offer direct instruction, and usually, this results in graduates with a surface approach to learning (Abdul Razzak, 2014). Students thus need an education that explicitly focuses on this, from lower secondary schools (Barana et al, 2020b) to higher education (Marchisio et al, 2020;Fissore et al, 2021b). Some authors also investigated the role of problem solving in the school Mathematics curriculum (Leong and Janjaruporn, 2015).…”

Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ten Tips for Successful Creation of Contextualized Problems for Secondary School Students with Maple

Sacchet

2022

Maple Trans.

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Students at all levels of schooling in all countries of the world need to practice mathematical problem solving to develop competencies that they will apply in real-life scenarios. On the other hand, concerning solving, problem posing refers to both the generation of new problems and the re-formulation of given problems. Teaching mathematics from a problem posing and problem-solving perspective entails more than solving non-routine problems or typical textbook types of problems. It is a way for students to exercise all aspects of problem solving: exploring, conjecturing, examining, testing, and generalizing. Tasks should be accessible and extend students’ knowledge. Even students should formulate problems from given situations and create new problems by modifying the conditions of a given problem. The quality of problems submitted to students is an issue that needs to be carefully considered. This work presents different ways to apply good practices when designing a problem-solving activity with students. It is based on the experience of Digital Math Training, a project whose aim is to develop and strengthen Mathematics and Computer Science skills through problem solving activities using the Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) Maple. After initial training in the laboratories of the schools, 3 students per class - the most skilled or motivated ones - participate in online training. They are asked to solve a problem every 10 days and to submit their solution. Meanwhile, students can participate in weekly synchronous tutoring on the use of Maple and collaborate with their colleagues through forum discussions. Students are selected in an intermediate competition and a final one. In this setting it is important to carefully plan and present the activity to the students, the text of the problem should be clear, and concise, with little storytelling to enter the setting of the problem. The problems should not be too theoretical, although they may inspect specific aspects of the related theory. They need to be solved by starting with simpler requests until the most difficult ones, close to the edge of students' knowledge, are reached. The solutions can make use of a calculator, in our case the ACE Maple. Precise design principles are based on both the adoption of suitable practice and the use of Maple. These principles can be adapted to different situations. The paper describes all these features with examples, according to the literature.

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Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ten Tips for Successful Creation of Contextualized Problems for Secondary School Students with Maple

Sacchet

2022

Maple Trans.

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“…Moreover, they identified seven core skills: technical, information management, communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. The development of problem solving is particularly important for officers, and there are many experiences on how to make military students develop this approach (Fissore et al, 2021). Digital skills fit into the broader concept of future skills, which are needed for societies to be sustainable and organizations to fit in changing environments (Ehlers, 2020, and references therein).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teachers' Digital Competences Before and During the Covid-19 Pandemic for the Improvement of Security and Defence Higher Education

2022

Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on E-Learning (EL 2022)

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COVID-19 hastened a trend that was already ongoing before the pandemic outbreak: the progressively increasing use of distance and online teaching and learning, alongside with lectures and classes. The potentialities of online teaching allowed a didactic continuity that would have been impossible otherwise, and this approach is likely to be maintained even after COVID-19 related restrictions end. From these remarks, it immediately follows that it is of great importance that teachers, students and other personnel, such as technicians and program managers, possess digital skills devoted to education. In the context of security and defence, areas with a strong international vocation, these skills are even more valuable. This research investigates the impact of COVID-19 on education in these contexts: the changes caused by the pandemic, the teachers' perception about some aspects of their job, such as the way they relate with students, and their ability to perform the same commitments in a different scenario. The research has been conducted based on the analysis of an online anonymous questionnaire with more than 500 responses. Results suggested the importance of the development of a training devoted to improving teachers' digital skills, since they live frontline in education, and they have been directly impacted by disruptive changes. This study is part of the European project Digital Competences for Improving Security and Defence Education -DIGICODE. Pursuing to the Digital Education Action Plan, the project aims at improving education quality in security and defence, by means of digital tools in didactics, and the development of teachers' professional competences.

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“…In the case of our study, the relations between clicks, time, and grades, are of inspiration, as for some of the authors previously cited, but jointly with methods that we experimented in the context of other research projects. For example, we consider how the digital learning environment we use allows for the insertion of interactive worksheets designed with the Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) Maple, which fosters more interactivity and problem-solving skills in students (Fissore et al, 2021). This suggests considering how much students considered worksheets with respect to the overall resources and activities explored, as one of the characteristics useful to draw profiles of the students themselves.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clustering Techniques to Investigate Engagement and Performance in Online Mathematics Courses

2022

Proceeedings of the 19th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2022)

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Among the various kinds of learning analytics emerging especially in the latest decade, clicking patterns cover a prominent role, fostered by their success in analyzing several types of data concerning activity on the web. They can be defined as sets of clicks performed by users, in which every set is treated as the basic unit. Few research has been performed on clicking patterns in educational contexts. In this paper, we perform analysis regarding clicks to an online course in Mathematics, aimed at allowing students to follow courses at a distance, both before and after enrolling at University. We used clustering techniques on students learning behavior, which have been defined for this research as visualizations of activities and resources of the course, to detect differences on students' grade according to their online learning behavior. Our results show that students tend to proceed on the course in both activities and resources. There is no correlation between participation and course grades, even if the most active students show higher scores. Moreover, patterns differ significantly according to the degree program of each student, showing the importance of tailored path.

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Development of Problem Solving Skills with Maple in Higher Education

Cited by 13 publications

References 19 publications

Ten Tips for Successful Creation of Contextualized Problems for Secondary School Students with Maple

Ten Tips for Successful Creation of Contextualized Problems for Secondary School Students with Maple

Teachers' Digital Competences Before and During the Covid-19 Pandemic for the Improvement of Security and Defence Higher Education

Clustering Techniques to Investigate Engagement and Performance in Online Mathematics Courses

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