Technology Use in Mathematics Education in China

Xiao-Shan Gao, Ma Fu & Pengyuan Wang
China

1.  Infrastructure Development

In the past ten years, the Chinese government has pushed forward the usage of information technology in education in a great effort. This can be shown from the following aspects [2].

(1) To build information technological infrastructure for education represented by building computer labs, campus internet, and city wide educational internets. In the period from 2000 to 2004, the number of computers in the schools increases from 1.1 millions to 6 millions; the number of schools with school internets increases to fifty thousands; the educational city wide internet covers over four hundred cities.

(2) Integration of the curriculum and information technology. In the government’s “tenth five year plan,” it is proposed to open information technology courses in high schools, junior high schools, and primary schools by year 2005, 2003, and 2001 respectively. This goal has been achieved ahead of schedule.

(3) In western part of China, the government has invested two billion Yuan to establish remote educational systems for primary and middle schools in order for schools there to share the educational resources in the cities.

(4) To train school teachers to increase their ability of using the educational information technology. The Ministry of Education plans to introduce the information technology certificates for teachers by year 2007. By year 2007, each primary and middle school teacher will have at least fifty hours of training on how to use information technology.

In the future, the Ministry of Education proposes to establish internet coverage for 90% of the nation’s schools by year 2010 to let the teachers in these schools sharing the educational resources on the internet. On the other aspect, the government has decided to shift the focus from hardware establishment to software development and the integration of software and hardware in real classroom application. The goal is to turn the school internet into an intelligent teaching and learning platform.

2. CAI Software Development

A large variety of CAI software packages was developed in China. Most of the commercial CAI software packages are digitalization of the textbook with multi-media technology. Many teachers also developed special purpose courseware for their classes. We will mainly introduce two pieces of general purpose CAI software developed in China.

One of the earliest general purpose CAI software developed in China is Geometry Expert [1], which is based on the research results of the Chinese school on automated reasoning. In the late 1970s, Wu’s method was proposed by the eminent Chinese mathematician Wen-Tsun Wu which can be used to prove hundreds of difficult theorems whose traditional proofs require enormous amounts of human intelligence. Inspired by the success of Wu's method, many other approaches to automated proving of geometry theorems have been proposed. The software Geometry Expert was originally developed in Unix platform around 1994. In 1997, a Windows based version was developed. Recently, a Java version was released. Geometry Expert consists of two parts: the proving and reasoning part, and the drawing part. The dynamic nature of its drawing part is comparable to that of Cabri and the Geometer's Sketchpad. As a geometry theorem prover, Geometry Expert implements Wu's method as well as the area method and the deductive basis method which can generate elegant and short (sometimes even shorter than those given by geometry experts) proofs.

Another representative general purpose CAI software is Z+Z developed by Prof. Jingzhong Zhang [4]. Z+Z is similar to Geometry Expert in that it is a piece of dynamic geometry software as well as a geometry theorem prover. Besides that, Z+Z has more resourses for educational purpose. For instance, it allows the user to input a proof for a theorem and to check if the proof is correct. It can produce proofs using the theorems from the standard textbooks. Z+Z system also has an instruction resource database which consists of hundreds of textbook related courseware.

3. Integration of Technology and Education

After the software and hardware are available for the teachers, it is still a problem on how to use these technologies to improve teaching. The simple or direct usage of technology is presentation. Teachers can design some courseware to show text, graphics, image and so on. With the power of the system, teachers can explain the concept of mathematics more clearly and students can get the idea more easily. But the teachers do not think that meet all their need. They hope that the system can be a tool related to the curriculum and has the power of doing reasoning and other mathematics operations.

In order to help teachers using technology in mathematics education, the K12 textbook center of Minster of Education initializes a project, “Trial Study of Applying Z+Z to National Mathematics Curriculum Reform.” The trial study tries to cover the key issues on technology use in mathematics education. It concerns the selection of appropriate software, training, organization, management and so on. The project consists of three groups [3].

First, a group was set up to guide teachers. A retired high school mathematics teacher who is also an expert of technology use in mathematics education is the head of this group. This allows the group to serve as a “bridge” to connect the technology and mathematics education.

Second, technology is embedded in the mathematics textbook. A professor from national mathematics curriculum standard group acts as the head of this project. In the mathematics textbooks written by them, some contents are based on the software system.

Third, there is a group to trace the study. The members of this group are not members of the project, and they can treat the trial study neutrally. They collect questionnaires from teachers and students, and interview them. They also record some classes of the teachers and apply video study method to find the teachers’ changes, their behaviors, their management of classes, and so on.

One hundred and seventeen (117) schools participated this two year trial. More and more teachers and students are benefited from the trial. Based on this project, a book was published [3] which consists of two parts: one part is research papers on CAI; another part consists of courseware designed by teachers.

References

1. Xiao-Shan Gao, Shang-Ching Chou, Jingzhong Zhang, Geometry Expert, Nine-Chapters Pub., Taipei, 1998.


2. Xiaowu Wang, The Road to the Information Age for Education of Primary and Middle Schools in China, Seminar of Integration of Information Technology and Curriculum, 2005.


3. Pengyuan Wang and Fu Ma, Applying Super Skethpad to National Mathematics Curriculum Reform, Science Press, Beijing, 2005.


4. Jingzhong Zhang, Z+Z Intelligent Education Platform, Beijing Normal University Press, Beijing, 2004.