What are the essential components of a doctorate program in mathematics education or didactics of mathematics concerning research, coursework, seminars, and collaboration? The purpose of this study was to learn from doctoral students across the world about how their programs in mathematics education are preparing them for research and teaching in mathematics education; how their programs provide academic research and writing support; and what they view as missing from their experiences. Online surveys, along with follow-up interviews from a subset of survey respondents, indicated that doctoral students from 17 different countries stressed the importance of international collaboration, examining fundamental theories of learning mathematics, and identified a need for more support with academic writing.
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The ‘Dancing with Mathematics’ workshop includes a variety of hands-on educational activities that combine these two seemingly incompatible disciplines through motion-capture technologies. A heterogeneous group of researchers with diverse academic backgrounds and expertise, that collaborate in the HORIZON-WIDERA project ‘TransEET’ (Transforming Education with Emerging Technologies) has: first, extended two digital technologies widely used for mathematics education (GeoGebra and MaLT2) with motion-capture technologies for embodied interaction; and then, co-developed the ‘Dancing with Mathematics’ pilot educational activities connecting dance and mathematics for different grades. In the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to engage in an innovative learning experience of using their bodies to express mathematical concepts for creating dancing animations. The workshop aims to collect feedback from the arts-related community to feed the redesign phase of the resources for the main phase of the TransEET project and discuss sustainable ways to support arts integration in the main body of school disciplines.
Social robots have been introduced in different fields such as retail, health care and education. Primary education in the Netherlands (and elsewhere) recently faced new challenges because of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and quarantines including students falling behind and teachers burdened with high workloads. Together with two Dutch municipalities and nine primary schools we are exploring the long-term use of social robots to study how social robots might support teachers in primary education, with a focus on mathematics education. This paper presents an explorative study to define requirements for a social robot math tutor. Multiple focus groups were held with the two main stakeholders, namely teachers and students. During the focus groups the aim was 1) to understand the current situation of mathematics education in the upper primary school level, 2) to identify the problems that teachers and students encounter in mathematics education, and 3) to identify opportunities for deploying a social robot math tutor in primary education from the perspective of both the teachers and students. The results inform the development of social robots and opportunities for pedagogical methods used in math teaching, child-robot interaction and potential support for teachers in the classroom
