Mobile Math Trails in Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

Mobile Math Trails in Europe

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Research and innovation; Pedagogy and didactics; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Background
Lots of materials and ideas has been developed for doing realistic math tasks inside the classroom. The Istron Group (https://userpages.uni-koblenz.de/~istron/home/) provides real world tasks, but they are not really authentic ( P.Vos, 2013). There are only a few organizations and schools who do and organise math outside the classroom. We know not so much about the impact of outdoor activities to the mathematical knowledge. (K. Vogt, 2013) It is a wide but yet kind of untouched field. All mathematical concepts, are based in the perceptual motor system experiences we have while interacting with the world around us (E.Wittmann, 2012) We want to fill in the gap, because we believe in the complementary advantages of doing math in- and outdoors. In the project we bring together universities, foundations, teacher associations and the economy who are interested to build a strategic partnership for doing outdoor math with mobile devices.

Objectives
Our aim in this project is to develop mobile math trails in Europe (MoMaTrE) which provides materials and methodology on one hand for teachers to create outdoor math activities easily for their classes and on the other hand for lecturers to create courses for teacher student to teach them how to enrich their future classes with mobile math activities.
Derivatives from the project are:
– Two mobile applications, one for walking math trails and one for creating math trails. The mobile apps will be provided to students, teachers or people who like to discover math in their environment or foreign cities.
– A long-term curriculum for a seminar/course for university students
– A short-term curriculum for summer schools (mainly for in-service teachers)
– Furthermore we will develop an interactive web portal which provides athoring tools to easily and fast create math trails. The web portal also allows interaction between users for a community aspect of working together and sharing tasks among the users..
– The catalogue of generic tasks, a collection of generic tasks which can be found outside and be adapted to the needs of the users. This supports the interactive webportal with lots of ideas for mathematical problems.

Consortium
The consortium contains 7 Partners from 5different countries (D, ES, F, P, SK). All of them will contribute to the project in different ways. We have experts for app programing, summer schools, for intensive study programmes, for validation and evaluation, for gamification, for dissemination, for public relations. We have universities, a research institute, a large teacher association and a company.

Planned activities
The consortium and its associate partners will develop math trails and corresponding things (like the Apps and the Web Portal), which will be validated and disseminated. Derivate from the rich material are a short term and a long term curriculum (students curriculum). Both curricula will be carried out at most of the consortiums universities.
Our activities are:
– Annual project meetings to bring together developed materials, share ideas and experiences, as well as planning the activities for the next year
– Intensive programme which will bring together students from participating universities to develop and test new material as well as disseminating the idea of doing outdoor mathematics.
– developing and carrying out long and short term curricula (summer schools for in-service teachers and seminars for students) to enrich and disseminate the project
– launching an interactive web portal for the users which will will help to create own math trails and build up a community of outdoor mathematics users

Results and impact
At the end of the three year lasting strategic partnership we can provide to the inhabitants of the countries who participate a holistic concept of math trails. We will have results on three different levels. Frist we have developed a long term curriculum (3 ECTS) and short term Curriculum which concerned to outdoor math education. Second we have developed apps for going on a math trail, which can be used in schools, Universities and of course for popularization of mathematics over all Europe. Third we will provide research results about outdoor and mobile math.

Longer term benefits
Europe becomes more and more digitalized. Digitalization means not that everything is converted into bits and bytes, but it means that the digital technology is connected to the real world. We show with MoMaTrE that we understand that lifelong learning is the combination of the digital world (using an App) and the real world (walk around and find math in your environment). All students and teachers who are involved in this programme by short term or long term curriculum will be members of a big math trail community and they will get Information about new features. We will provide the app to European cities administration who are interested in an alternative city tour, a math walk. This is our lifelong learning idea.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 390545 Eur

Project Coordinator

JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE-UNIVERSITATFRANKFURT AM MAIN & Country: DE

Project Partners

• INSTITUTO POLITECNICO DO PORTO
• FEDERACION ESPAÑOLA DE SOCIEDADES DE PROFESORES DE MATEMATICAS
• UNIVERZITA KONSTANTINA FILOZOFA VNITRE
• INESC ID – INSTITUTO DE ENGENHARIADE SISTEMAS E COMPUTADORES, INVESTIGACAO E DESENVOLVIMENTO EM LISBOA
• Autentek GmbH
• UNIVERSITE LYON 1 CLAUDE BERNARD