Title of Initiative / Project
MatematicaMENTE
Name of Organiser
Antonio Bernardo
Start and ending date of the Initiative
2000-->
Was the initiative carried out in the framework of a funded project?
No
Type of deliverables
Online course, Teaching Methodology, Video, On-line Game
Language of the deliverable
Italian
Target Group
Teachers, Students
Description of the initiative
Nowadays Matematicamente.it is a community of students, teachers and keen people. The website deals with education in general not only with Mathematics. This education is centered on the interaction between writers and users, experts and keen people. The portal hosts free contents (Creative Commons) on the one hand and Educational entertainment contents on the other hand.
Further then these typically didactic and educational contents, the website deals with other cultural topics that are not dealt with at school and about which there are few printed material. Matematicamente.it aims to collect and share the didactic material made by each teacher/student. In fact this material was generally available only for friends or students.
The main purpose is to explore the didactic potential of the Internet for teaching of Maths, Computer and scientific disciplines in general using even more technological advanced, multimedia, interactive and social tools.
Notes, research material, tests, solved exercises, handbooks, simulations, animations, video lessons, didactic games and other materials are available on the website and are available to be used at school, in class or in lab.
In a second phase other more ludic initiatives have been added to the merely didactic ones: challenge of mathematic intelligence, yearly chess cup, sudoku, numeric cross puzzle and other similar games; contests of humorous drawing, of photography,…
Teachers’ Opinion
Since many years this website is a benchmark both for teachers and for pupils.
Beyond the variety of causes for reflections and the wide set of topics that this portal collects, its strength is the way that allow to gather and to share the materials.
The availability of games is also remarkable because they attract the pupils in an indirect way to mathematic topics and reasoning.
Many times I downloaded games from this portal in order to present the Maths in a less formal and more engaging way. This is useful above all for the less motivated pupils and for those less used to follow the rules and the formalisms.
The portal is easy to be surfed. The “forum” and “magazine” sections gather many interesting topics which are useful to talk about and to deepen. There are many typologies of tests and exercises (divided by difficulty) and they are dealt with clearly and exhaustively.
The loading speed of the video-lessons session can be improved. The access to this session should be for free in order to increase the accessibility of the portal.
Students’ Opinion
The pupils appreciate very much this portal. They consider it a valid tool where they can find:
- well-done tests;
- exercises helping to understand how “to solve equations, factorisation and many other kinds of problems”;
- very cute, funny and challenging games that are “useful in order to train themselves in view of the final exam”.
Almost all the pupils disagree with the design of the homepage that “should be improved”. They do not like also the subscription required to access to the video lessons that “are much more interesting in spite of an already solved exercise.
The pupils stress on the fact that “the website would be perfect if all the sections were for free. A step by step explanation instead of whatever exercise passively copied from the blackboard is more useful for a pupil in difficulty”.
The best would be if “the web page loading was not so slow”.
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