| As the Internet revolution continues, its rate of
growth alone would be a job for any mathematician. But maths teachers and
students would do better to exploit the Net for gems to enliven their classes -
and by making their own contributions.
At Research Machines' "Internet for Learning", there's a
massive list of mathematical sites, ordered alphabetically. In fact at
virtually any site you will find the obligatory list of links to other
recommended sites. The encyclopedic collection of all things mathematical at
"Eric's Treasure Trove" took nine years to create. Theorems, facts, proofs and
definitions are all ordered alphabetically, from the 15 slide-puzzle (fifteen
square tablets and one space in a 4x4 grid) to Zsigmondy's theorem (something
to do with prime factors).
The Canadian-based "The Math Forum" includes a host of
resources from schools around the country: at other sites you can find
collections of puzzles, conundrums and optical illusions.
There are specialist areas too. At the one on pi, you can
search for your birth date in pi's decimal equivalent, 3.14159...the decimal
expansion. The San Francisco Explatorium celebrates pi day every March 14th
(3.14), incidentally Albert Einstein's birthday! Other sites are devoted to the
Fibonacci sequence, fractals, M.C.Escher, the history of mathematics.
Want to know the current record holder for world's largest
prime number? you can find out on the Web. On the 3rd September this year David
Slowinski and Paul Gage found that 2 to the power of 1257787 minus 1 is prime.
The number has 378,632 digits and took a Cray supercomputer 6 hours to test.
Several universities have sites, including Glasgow (the
STEPS project) and Essex. So have The Association of Teachers of Mathematics,
The Royal Statistical Society, UNICEF, the National Lottery, and many
manufacturers and publishers. One problem is the lack of quality control but
most educational sites contain something of value.
Apart from being a source of information, the Web is
invaluable for easy communication. Contacting a web-site in Australia appears
no different to contacting one in your own town. Schools can link together,
exchange information via e-mail and ask for responses on a topic - say a
statistical survey into the weather - and get them back promptly.
Microsoft have made freely available an add-on to Excel
which allows you to convert any Excel spreadsheet - now a standard maths tool -
to HTML format used to create web pages. In another development, a software
company in the US have developed a spreadsheet which is interactive over the
Internet itself.
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And during this academic year, Norfolk will be
piloting such a scheme in which it will publish a mathematical puzzle once a
month on the internet, giving teams of pupils from various schools the chance
to work it out.
The only problem with this new form of publishing is
letting everyone know your work is there. This is the paradoxical problem posed
by the Internet. Free and available to all but who is to know it's there?
Ironically, the easiest is to resort to traditional publishing. Get your
address into the magazines and newspapers which give listings of new sites.
"Search engines" on the net itself can search for all
mentions of key words, giving you a list of sites that may be relevant. But you
will be faced with a site list thousands of items long.if your keywords are
"mathematics, spreadsheet".
As a busy teacher, I've found the Internet a useful source
of materials - I've ordered and paid for a CD on the Net. On a more mundane
level, any page can be saved on your own computer and printed out.
Some sites offer introductory guides to popular software -
Microsoft Excel, for example. There is also a step by step guide to the TEXAS
Instruments TI-82 calculator. You can "download" shareware, demo copies of
software (for example COYPU, the new graph processor for the Shell Centre,
based on MousePlotter), pay for the full program and download the documentation
too. This is bound eventually to become the norm for software publishers.
You can also download files to go with your programs, which
often come from third parties, not the original publishers.
It is fairly straightforward now for anyone to produce
their own web page. Though any page is basically a simple mix of text and
graphs, there is a lot of potential for creativity.
For example, simple animations can be created which the web
browsers, like Navigator can read. You could try your hand at an illustration
of transformation geometry that the whole world can view!
Teachers can publicise competitions and make their best
worksheets available or they can use it to get some things off their chests -
complaints about the curriculum, the changing standards at A Level, the pass
rate at GCSE or the Secretary of State, for example. Publish and be damned!
As the Internet expands, so do its facilities, like full
animation, sound and video and live communication. If you're not already doing
it, why not give it a try?
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