TEACHING AND LEARNING MATHEMATICS WITH VIRTUAL WORLDS…用虚拟世界教学和学习数学.pdfVIP

TEACHING AND LEARNING MATHEMATICS WITH VIRTUAL WORLDS Michael BULMER Department of Mathematics The University of Queensland, Australia 4072 mrb@.au ABSTRACT Much of mathematics and statistics is taught using textbook examples and exercises. It is difficult through these to give students a feel for the broad issues involved. Ideally students could carry out experiments in the real world to then model and analyse mathematically. However, this is not practical for large classes and the logistic s may even detract from the learning. We propose using virtual worlds instead, allowing students to manipulate the parameters of a simulated experiment and record the results. These simulations should be messy, requiring the students to think about measure ment issues and noise and how these impact on the mathematics. The results can then be used as a starting point for teaching, in place of the traditional exercise settings. We give experiences and feedback from several virtual worlds for statistics and dis cuss current work on virtual worlds for calculus. 1. Introduction Teaching large service courses in calculus and statistics is a difficult challenge, requiring the motivation of students whose main interest is typically not mathematics and whose mathematica l backgrounds can vary greatly. On the other side, student learning is affected by similar issues. Additionally a current concern for many students is time pressure and the need for efficiency. Lectures and laboratories based on virtual worlds aim to address these issues. They motivate theories and methods by providing a concre