MoMaTrE – Page 2 – MathCityMap

As part of our Erasmus+ Project Mobile Math Trails in Europe (MoMaTrE) you can discover MathCityMap and Outdoor Mathematics with an international group of teachers in the beautiful historic city of Granada!

Do you want to…

experience MathCityMap and Outdoor Mathematics in an intensive teacher training programme,
work with other teachers and exchange your MathCityMap experiences,
visit Granada and do mathematics in a cultural and historical environment?

From 16th to 19th April 2020, a three-day international teacher training will take place in Granada, Spain. During this Multiplier Event, the participants will get to know additional features of the system MathCityMap from different perspectives, create their own tasks and trails and exchange experiences made with the system. We invite all interested teachers to apply for this teacher training.

The event is organized by the Erasmus+ Project MoMaTrE and co-funded by Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. Through this, the MoMaTrE project can cover the participants’ costs for the conference, accomodation and meals.

Please find all relevant information for the application, on the schedule and the location on the MoMaTrE website!

Within the Erasmus+ project „Mobile Math Trails in Europe“, 30 European university students met in Frankfurt for the two last weeks of March 2019. Their goal: Learn about math trails and MathCityMap, create own math trails, test them with students, and of course – make intercultural and international contacts.

The Intensive Study Programme took place at Goethe University Frankfurt from 18^th till 30^th March 2019. The participating students came from Nitra (Slovakia), Lyon (France), Porto (Portugal), Lisbon (Portugal) and Frankfurt (Germany).

Opening of the ISP

During the first days, the students received a lot of input from our project partners and invited experts in the field of outdoor education. The students heard different lectures on task design and outdoor research, ran a traditional math trail without technical equipment and a MathCityMap math trail around Campus Bockenheim. With nice weather, the students were very motivated in solving as many tasks as possible.

A group while running a MCM trail

After a change of perspective, the students became task creators on their own. In international groups they worked on tasks for school students on different levels. Firstly, they searched for tasks in Frankfurt’s New Old Town, conducted a peer review and feedback round and finally created a tested math trail. During the next week, school students arrived on two different days to run the math trails. Even though the tasks were of course in English, the school students had a lot of fun and success in solving the MCM tasks.

The students in Frankfurt’s New Old Town

Special highlights within the Intensive Study Programme were the excursion to the Mathematikum in Gießen with a lecture by Albrecht Beutelspacher, the visits of German math classes and the final math trail competition during the closing ceremony with awards and certificates.

Visit of the Mathematikum

After the intense time we can conclude: The two weeks were a big success for the students and also for the whole MoMaTrE and MathCityMap project. Thank you to all participants and their contributions. We are looking forward to many new tasks designed by the students!

MoMaTrE (Mobile Math Trails in Europe) – this is the name of the european project to spread technology supported math trails in Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and Slovakia. From 6th until 9th of November Moritz Baumann and Iwan Gurjanow (both Goethe University) visited Nitra (Slovakia) and carried out several workshops in collaboration with Sona Ceretkova (Professor for mathematics education at the university Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre) with the focus on outdoor modelling with MathCityMap.

Workshops

The workshop preparations took place on Tuesday afternoon. In this context we created a math trail that contains ten tasks, that the participants of the workshops should complete. Amongst other things, the current task of the week is part of the trail. The area around the university as well as the beautiful old town of Nitra have been inspected and suitable objects were photographed and measured.

On Wednesday and Thursday morning two sessions of 90 minutes each for teacher students took place. The future teachers could gain insights into the theory of education outside the classroom, the theory of math trails as well as mathematical modelling. However, the participants had the most fun with the practical part in which they had to complete the math trail (see series of pictures). During the math trail, the new digital classroom feature could be successfully tested. The second session focused on creating a math trail with the use of MathCityMap. The participants showed great interest in the project and participated actively in the work phases. For us, the practical phases of a workshop are very important. They allow future teachers to get in touch with the new technology and to reduce fears to use digital media in classroom. Hopefully, this contributes to an increased use of digital media and in this context of MathCityMap in the real mathematics classroom in the future.

On Wednesday afternoon, teacher students of the primary school listened to a lecture about math trails and modelling. The lecture was held in English and translated simultaniously into Slovakish (see impressions in the lecture hall). It was the first time that students were able to attend an international lecture and certainly aroused interest, for example in participating in the Intensive Program for Mathtrails at the Goethe University in March 2019. The exchange between students and lecturers from the participating European countries is one of the goals of the Erasmus + project.

The travel was concluded by a 3 hours workshop for in-service teachers of mathematics in Nitra. The session was structured in a similiar way as described above and offered the participants to get in touch with new possibilities of integrating smartphones in their mathematics classroom.

Conclusion

Overall, we consider the meeting in Nitra a great success for the European project. The events was tightly clocked and could all be successfully completed. The cooperation and the exchange with the Slovak lecturers was furthermore informative for us. We were able to enjoy a great hospitality, get to know the beautiful city in the short spare time in an authentic way and learn about the Slovak education system. The next MoMaTrE project meeting will take place in Nitra too and we look forward to it!

Impressions

The following pictures show impressions of the city and our workshops.

The MathCityMap team thanks our MoMaTrE partners from Portugal for a special outdoor event with MCM. Read their impressions in the following article by Amélia Caldeira and Ana Moura:

In the center of Matosinhos, a city in Porto’s metropolitan area, in Portugal, the mathematics was breathed with the event “Matemática vai ao Jardim” (Math goes to the Garden) on March 23rd. This event aims to celebrate mathematics and its relevance in everyday life, and in the progress of society. The main idea of this celebration was to use the students’ mathematical skills in the real world.

In a fun and innovative way, 170 students from Augusto Gomes Secondary School, equipped with a smartphone and the MathCityMap app (MCM app), answered several mathematical challenges, having as a backdrop the Garden Basílio Teles, in Matosinhos, and all its surroundings.

It was a competition between teams of three or four students. All of them benefited from an outdoor activity: they left the school building, walked around and explorde the center of Matosinhos.

Using their mathematical knowledge, they solved the proposed tasks. All the tasks were in accordance with the knowledge level in which the team was in. Three math trails, with five tasks each, were designed: a route for 7th and 8th grade students, a route for 9th grade students, and another route for students from the 10th to the 12th grades.

Through the MCM app, students went on an outdoor walk along a route and solved math problems that were contextualized with the surrounding environment. The students passed through special places in Matosinhos, where math can be experienced in everyday situations. For example, a swing to calculate angles measures, lake bridge to calculate areas, garden benches to apply combinatorial calculus,…

The map with the location of the fifteen tasks is showed in figure 1:

Fig.1 – location of the fifteen tasks

In the end, the best team was selected from each of the three routes. The criteria for choosing the best team was the highest number of correct answers. In case of equality, the team that answered in the minimum time.

Both students and teachers of Augusto Gomes enjoyed the event “Matemática vai ao Jardim”.

Fig.2 – students measure the circumference of a sphere

You can find a briefly video-report here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr9XwMFfUnc&feature=youtu.be).

ISEP/P.Porto team who designed and invigorated the event:

Amélia Caldeira, Ana Moura, Ana Júlia Viamonte, Isabel Figueiredo, Helena Brás, Alexandra Gavina and Alzira Faria.

Through the cooperation project MoMaTrE (Mobile Math Trails in Europe – www.momatre.eu), MathCityMap could be presented on an international level in various ways.

On 23.03., about 170 students at the age of 12-18 years took part in the activity “Mathematics goes to the Garden” which was organized by the MoMaTrE partners in Portugal and involved diverse MathCityMap tasks.

Special thanks to Amélia Caldeira for the photo, which shows a group while measuring. Further impressions can be found on our Twitter Account (@mathcitymap).

Also in Lyon, France, MathCityMap could be presented successfully at the beginning of the week as part of the congress Math en Jeans. Here a special thanks to Christian Mercat. The involved trail, which can be seen in the picture, can be found here.

On Thursday, 5th October 2017, the EU project MoMaTrE officially started in the House of Mathematics at the École Normal Superieure Lyon. MoMaTrE is the acronym for Mobile Math Trails in Europe and that is exactly what we want to do within the next 3 years: to spread the Math Trail idea with the help of new technologies in Europe. All project partners from five EU countries (France, Germany, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain) were represented and prepared the first milestones for the various subprojects. One thing is already clear: MCM will play a central role in MoMaTrE and will be further developed. It should be noted that future versions of the app will contain educational features, that there will be 100 generic tasks as well as an app for authors with which one can create MCM tasks on site.

On the picture you can see from left to right

On the stairs: Matthias Ludwig (GU, Frankfurt), Immanuel Scheerer (Aut, Berlin), Johannes Scheerer (Aut, Berlin), Christian Mercat (UCBL, Lyon)

Below: Ana Moura (IPP, Porto) , Claudia Lazaro (FESPME, Santander), Patrik Berger (UCBL, Lyon), Carmen Monzo Gonzalez (FESPME, Santander), Iwan Gurjanow (GU, Frankfurt), Joerg Zender (GU, Frankfurt), Pedro Santos (INESC-ID, Lisbon), Amelia Caldeira (IPP, Porto), Imrich Jakab (CPU, Nitra), Sona Ceretkova (CPU, Nitra).

After one year of preparation we managed it: MathCityMap is the heart of the Strategic Partnership MoMaTrE. MoMaTrE is an acronym for Mobile Math Trails in Europe. The working group MATIS I led the application for this Erasmus + project. Currently, seven institutions from five countries are participating:

Goethe University, Frankfurt
Univerzita Konstantina Filozofa, Nitra, Slovakia
Université Claude Bernard, Lyon, France
Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento, Lisbon, Portugal
Instituto Superior de Engenharia, Porto, Portugal
Autentek GmbH, Berlin (software company)
Federación Española de Sociedades de Profesores de Matemáticas, Santander, Spain

Within the next three years, the project has the following aims

Spread of mobile Math Trails across Europe
Further development of MathCityMap (including Gamification, mobile authoring tools, new task formats, educational Math Trail features)
Database for generic Tasks
Development and implementation of (international) training modules (shortterm curriculum)
Development and implementation of accredited seminars on outdoor mathematics (longterm curriculum)
Explore the use of mobile math trails and present the results at congresses and publications

Apart from the contentual reasons, the many supporting letters of our associate partners were responsible for the award. For example, we were able to convince the MNU, the Media Office of the DMV, Mathe im Leben, the DZLM, and the Stiftung Rechnen. From France are supported by the IREM, from Spain the Royal Spanish Society of Mathematics, from Portugal the Mathematicial Society as well as the Mathematics Teaching Association, and from Slovakia the Association of Slovak mathematicians and physicists.

Tag: MoMaTrE

Intensive teacher training programme in Granada 2020

The MoMaTrE Intensive Study Programme

MoMaTrE workshops in Nitra

Workshops

Conclusion

Impressions

MoMaTrE project in Portugal

MCM International Events

MoMaTrE Kick Off at ENS Lyon

MoMaTrE – Mobile Math Trails In Europe