Posted on 08/01/2006 11:21:28 AM PDT by CarrotAndStick
NEW DELHI: There is hope for the “mathophobic”. A new tool for Indian school children promises to vanquish the dreaded math nightmare.
Leading e-learning solutions provider, Educomp, has launched Mathguru to “change the way students learn math”. The math-aid programme is designed to help students from class VI to XII solve problems as per the NCERT school curriculum.
“Mathguru will make math fun and easy,” says Shantanu Prakash, managing director of the company. “It shifts the learning process from a passive instructive mode to an exploratory mode,” he adds.
Speaking at the launch of the programme, former academic director of CBSE, Dr Balasubramaniam said: “Math has the maximum number of failures. There is a sense of mathophobia in India despite it being a user (learner)-friendly subject. Mathguru will help build the confidence level of children and eliminate mathophobia.”
The programme, he said, was user-friendly. “Self-paced learning takes place. It is not only a learning tool for children, but also for parents. The idea is to instill in schoolchildren an I-can-do-it attitude.”
So how do you get it right? Dr Gaurav Bhatnagar of Educomp, says, by way of discovery and research. He quotes Paul Helenos’ maxim that the only way to learn is to do mathematics. Bhatnagar claims to have found reasons for why students love and hate math.
“Children hate math because they don’t get the right answer every time. They love it because they enjoy every time they get it right...This is where Mathguru comes in”, he says, inferring that the programme will help students get the solution right every time.
Can an e-learning solution such as Mathguru put an end to the woes of millions of students and parents across the country? Can technological intervention be better than a teacher in a classroom?
“Students need technology only to complement their formal learning. There is no supplement to a teacher. Aids such as Mathguru only complement, but importantly, make learning interesting and playful,” Prakash says.
Ajay Vijh of Magic Software, a leading e-learning solutions provider, points out that “e-learning should not be confused with digitised content. Interactive, self-paced and participatory learning are all fine. But what is important is teachers’ and parents’ attitude towards technology. It is the mindset that will swing things in favour or otherwise”.
“We need to educate teachers. UK is finding it uncomfortable because teachers are not comfortable with technology. How many schools in India invest in general infrastructure leave alone technology infrastructure? E-learning companies have to invest on teachers. Only then can they exploit interactive content. Simply providing computer-based training will bear no fruit,” Vijh, who looks after Magic’s UK operations, says.
The Becta Review 2006 , that examined the progress of ICT in education in England, says more investment has helped improve technology and infrastructure. The Review states that schools and colleges now have interactive whiteboards which help in an improved pace of learning, increased pupil motivation and better outcomes.
E-learning is the fastest growing sub-sector of a $2.3 trillion education market according to Hezel Associates. The Indian slice of the pie may not be big, but has huge potential by the virtue of the population size.
In India -- with a national education budget of Rs 18,337 crore -- private tutoring is currently valued at a huge Rs 7,000 crore. Math constitutes over one-third of this. Parents spend Rs 10,000 crore to help children with post-school aids and other educational paraphernalia. In this scenario, Educomp’s bid is to provide a way around expensive tutorials. The Mathguru costs Rs 1,200. And it is a one-time cost.
“Mathguru’s website is designed to help students complete their homework, practice and revise. Importantly, it creates and increases the students’ interest”, says Abhinav Dhar, Senior Vice-President, Educomp Solutions Ltd.
“As parents, we can concentrate on our work leaving our children to solve math problems on their own,” he goes on to say.
John Holt, in his absorbing study, “ How Children Fail ” used his lifelong experience in education to find answers to how mass failure takes place and what really goes on in classrooms.
He writes that even without the help of aids, “children seem to be innately gifted learners, acquiring, long before they go to school, a vast quantity of knowledge by a process called ‘Piagetian learning’ or ‘learning without being taught’”.
But, “our educational culture gives mathematics learners scarce resources for making sense of what they are learning. As a result, our children are forced to follow the very worst model for learning mathematics, the model of rote learning”, he says, adding that “the child’s perception is fundamentally correct. The kind of mathematics foisted on children in school is not meaningful, fun, or even very useful...”
Mathguru sees math as fun -- it uses illustrations and step-by-step procedures to explain the problem and arrive at a solution. Experts use their own voice and a virtual pen to explain how to make it more personal, recreating the ambience of a classroom.
Did they provide a web address?
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"If I knew God I'd be Him". Yet He seems a mathematician, in some sense.
Amen! I can't imagine a successful math teaching program that doesn't have rote learning as its base.
Yes it would have been easier and faster if I had done the rote work, but I'm really not sure I could have done it at age 7.
I think if rote work were interspersed with pattern recognition sorts of exercises, we might get some interesting results.
In my house we had some books by Lancelot Hogben (I think) with lots of pictures and diagrams and such -- a kind of child's garden of the history of mathematics. That certainly spurred me on when the idea of tons of reckoning and sums made me want to puke....
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