Describes PC Logo, an instructional tool that can be used for teaching and enhancing a student's knowledge of graphs and geometric concepts. (CCM)

Describes a sixth-grade interdisciplinary geometry unit based on Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol". Focuses on finding area, volume, and perimeter, and working with estimation, decimals, and fractions in the context of making gingerbread houses. (ASK)

Describes an activity in which students use computers and techniques from Op Art to learn various geometric concepts. Allows them to see the distinct connection between art and mathematics from a personal perspective. Reinforces writing, speaking, and drawing skills while creating slide shows related to the project. (ASK)

Explores the role of proof in mathematics education and provides justification for its importance in the curriculum. Discusses three applications of dynamic geometry software--heuristics, exploration, and visualization--as tools in the teaching of proof and as potential challenges to the importance of proof. (Author/MM)

Reports on a long-term teaching experiment carried out in the 9th and 10th grades of a scientific high school as part of a larger research project. Aims to clarify the role of a particular software, Cabri Geometry, in the teaching/learning process. Focuses on the social construction of knowledge. (Author/MM)

Students at all levels benefit from a multi-faceted approach to learning abstract material. The most commonly used technique in teaching the pure theory of international trade is a combination of geometry and algebraic derivations. Numerical simulation can provide a valuable third support to these approaches. The author describes a simple…

In early 2004, Cabrilog released version "II plus" of their interactive geometry package. According to the author, "Cabri Geometry II plus" is clearly a much more useful package than the earlier version. However, unlike other sophisticated applications packages, the designers have avoided creating so many options that secondary students lose their…

Mathematical games provide wonderful opportunities to engage students in meaningful and rich mathematical investigations. This article describes three mathematical games suitable to be played by different groups of students, from young elementary school students, learning the basics of arithmetic and geometry, to older students making their first…

High school students normally encounter the study and use of formal proof in the context of Euclidean geometry. Professional mathematicians typically use an informal trial-and-error approach to a problem, guided by intuition, to arrive at the truth of an idea. Formal proof is pursued only after mathematicians are intuitively convinced about the…

"Nuggets" are suggestions with practical advice to help in communicating biology to students. They are shorter than the formal papers and have not been peer-reviewed, but may provide ideas for the classroom. This article presents inexpensive alternative methods for students to measure small volumes of liquids in school biology laboratories.

This research was designed to study Taiwanese junior high school students' understanding about the validity of conditional statements. Distinguishing between validity and truth is a crucial topic in mathematical reasoning and argumentation but has been always neglected in the mathematics curriculum at junior high school level of schooling. The…

This paper reports research that focuses on student teachers' reflections on their learning process in a collaborative problem-solving context. One group of students with limited mathematical backgrounds worked on two problems in geometry without teacher intervention. We focus on two episodes from the group dialogues. In the first episode (section…

The sequential organization of actions necessary to construct a figure in a dynamic geometry environment (DGE) introduces an explicit order of construction. Such sequential organization produces what is, in effect, a hierarchy of dependences, as elements of the construction depend on something created earlier. This hierarchy of dependences is one…

Time is a constraint but also a condition of operating within a didactic system. Don't we need to distinguish several kinds of times? Our study will focus on teachers' time management strategies. We will identify these strategies by taking into account two temporal dimensions--didactic time and time capital--and the rate at which the former…

This article is about a computer lab project in which prospective teachers used Geometer's Sketchpad software to create two-dimensional nets for three-dimensional shapes. Since this software package does not contain ready-made tools for creating non-regular or regular polygons, the students used prior knowledge and geometric facts to create their…