Courses/Conferences
| Courses/ Conferences |
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| The conference took place in Makuhari, which is to the east of Toyko, in a new conference centre. At the Opening ceremony in Makuhari Event Hall a sequence of welcoming messages were delivered (with simultaneous Japanese/English translation) from key figures in Japanese education and organisers of ICME. Messages were quoted from the Japanese Prime Minister and the US President. | |
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| At the International
Round Table, video conferencing was used to link Japan with Singapore and
USA. Mr Wee Heng Tin, Director General of Education, Singapore, talked about
the possibilities of the Internet, with users customising content. 40% on
Singapore households are on-line. But what about the "digital divide"
- those with on-line access and those without? The US speaker Bruce Alberts
talked about hands-on learning and learning how to learn. Akito Akihira
discussed issues caused by students downloading without understanding. Gilah
Leder from Australia was ambivalent about technology, mentioning again the
digital divide in less developed countries compared to affluent homes. Teachers
have inadequate training in new technologies; in fact their students are more
proficient. Other issues included: reduced teaching time for maths; maths in the workplace - the notion of "workplace" is changing. how much maths should a primary teacher know? making mistakes is fine need to convince primary students that maths is important. more research needed improve salary structures the internet requires new skills of filtering information The first Plenary Lecture described the history and nature of educational research. |
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| Throughout the conference
an Exhibition of mathematics was on display, including commercial
contributions from Casio (who presented the Algebra FX 2.0 graphic calculator,
the Cassiopeia hand-held computer and the Educaton website
WEW), Texas
Instruments and Hewlett Packard, and many other contributions from mathematical
organisations and individuals. British interest included Cambridge University
Press, SMP, MEI, QCA
"World Class Tests", the
Shell
Centre and an American teacher's presentation of "Maths tours of
England"! An initiative from the Mathematical Association is to set up
"1000 problems for the Millenium". The UK-based CAME project was
represented by a researcher from Hong Kong. Both Fathom and Geometer's
Sketchpad were being demonstrated by their authors Bill Finzer and Nick Jackiw.
A Japanese display by AMI offered help in constructing origami figures. There were over 300 individual presentations consisting of a poster, video or software. On one afternoon a team of UK teachers set up a "Chaos workshop". |
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| Also available in the Exhibition Hall was an Internet corner, where you could queue for the opportunity of 10 minutes to send and receive email. | |
| Working Group for Action
11 began with introductory talk from Paul Goldenburg on "Finding some
common notions about technology in maths learning". This consisted of
discussion of the appropriate use of calculators, including skills of
estimation. Much of his lecture would now be labelled "numeracy" in
the UK. The MathsNet presentation followed. Later presentations in this group included: NRICH, the Cambridge based website, described by Jenni Way the Rekennet (Arithmetic Net), aimed at improving communication between teachers, described by Nina Boswinkel and Frans Moerlands from the Netherlands Mathmuse, a museum on the web, described by Tohsuke Urabe from Japan. In the Topic Study Group 7 the NCTM website Illuminations was described, followed by a talk on use of Excel. A summary of use of multimedia technology in China by Xuhui Li from the University of Texas, described how booming educational reform is taking place. Geometer's Sketchpad has taken off nationally. Eliane Cousquer from France presented an On-line university, which includes Java applets and use of CGI-Perl scripting. Also mentioned in distributed papers was the mathematical didactics database MATHDI, java applets from Manipula Math and the Suken project. |
| One day was put aside for a tourism trip to somewhere in Japan. The above views show Hakone, Mt Fuji and a temple on Mt Fuji. | |
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| One of the Regular
lectures presented by Osamu Takenouchi was on "Some characteristic
features of Wasan: the Japanese traditional maths". Wasan was developed
during the Edo period (1603-1867); there was no recorded literature about maths
prior to that. A brilliant demonstration of the Sobokan abacus finished the
lecture. Another regular lecture was delivered by Walter Whitely of York University, Toronto, Canada, on visual geometry, making use of Geometer's Sketchpad and other visual aids, including ways of teaching calculus visually and links between dynamic geometry and the structure of proteins. One of the final Plenary lectures, presented by Erich Wittmann, University of Dortmund, Germany, was about SLEs, Substantial Learning Environments, and described the learning potential in some key mathematical investigations. "Education is neither a right nor a privilege, it is a necessity." At the Cabri Project, various short papers were presented, including calculation of the centre of gravity of polygons by Katsuhiko Sata using a Cabri-java applet. Details of ICME-10, Copenhagen 2004 are available at www.ICME-10.dk |
| On the Saturday of the conference a hands-on Mathematical Art in ICME 9 fun event was held in the Event Hall. Exhibits included: | |
| largest shape round a corner parabolic snooker table hyperbolic snooker table Pythagoras' theorem conic sections Pascals triangle |
probability distributions tesselation polyhedra mirror symmetry curves and gravity calculus |
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| At 6.00am on the last morning for this author in Japan, the hotel TV displayed a session on solutions of quadratic equations! | |
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