Articles

• Manipulative bulletin board for early categorization

  1-12

  Chrysanthi Skoumpourdi

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  9

  According to various researchers categorization is a developmentally appropriate mathematical concept for young children. Classifying objects also relates to every day activities of human life. The manipulative bulletin board (MBB) served as a kind of auxiliary means for approaching categorization by young children. In this article we investigated the kind of MBB that pre-service early childhood education teachers constructed in order to involve children in tasks of categorization, as well as, the way children manipulated these boards in order to categorize items. The MBB, as teaching aids, facilitated the engagement of the children in different categorization processes.

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• How to teach computer programming if our goal is the International Olympiad in Informatics

  13-25

  Sándor Király

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  12

  Nowadays if a student in Hungary (age between 17-20 years old) wants to be the member of the Hungarian selected team (has four members) to participate in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), first, he has to qualify himself in the first fifteen of the National Secondary School Competition (OKTV) in the programming category after the III. round. Then he should be in the first four place after the sixth round of the Selection Competition. Being successful is necessary that the student wants to start studying computer programming at least in the 9th school year and he needs a teacher who prepares him. In the last nine years three students of the author have participated in five Olympics and two of them won gold and bronze medals. This article wants to demonstrate the methods that a teacher needs to use to teach students in 9th school year for computer programming, to be the member of the Hungarian National Team after three or four years.

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• Combinatorics teaching experiment

  27-44

  Károly Csabay

  József Daragó

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  12

  Teaching combinatorics has got its conventional method. One has to see: the combinatorical formations won't be follow each other by a heuristic way. The formulas kept by pupils seem to come from "deus ex machina". We try to offer now an alternative way to approach combinatorical concepts from a nontraditional direction and point of view.

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• Teaching reliability theory with the Computer Algebra System Maxima

  45-75

  Attila Csenki

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  7

  The use of the Computer Algebra System Maxima as a teaching aid in an MSc module in Reliability Theory is described here. Extracts from student handouts are used to show how the ideas in Reliability Theory are developed and how they are intertwined with their applications implemented in Maxima. Three themes from the lectures are used to illustrate this: (1) Normal Approximations, (2) Markov Modelling, (3) Laplace Transform Techniques.
  It is argued that Maxima is a good tool for the task, since: it is fairly easy to learn & use; it is well documented; it has extensive facilities; it is available for any operating system; and, finally, it can be freely downloaded from the Web. Maxima proves to be a useful tool even for Reliability research for certain tasks. This latter feature provides a seamless link from teaching to research – an important feature in postgraduate education.

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• Facilitating class attendance to improve student achievements

  77-90

  Ye Sun

  Weifeng Chen

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  9

  Many studies have revealed that attendance is strongly associated with students' achievements, and have proposed different strategies to improve students' attendance. However, there are few studies investigating how to efficiently take students' attendance – the key component to improve students' attendance. Taking attendance manually is inefficient since it will consume part of the limited class time. This paper describes the design and the implementation of an online attendance system that is currently used in classes at West Virginia University and California University of Pennsylvania. Examples of the system are provided online. Implementation codes of the system are shared, which can be used to teach computer science courses such as Web Programming or Client-Server Script Languages.

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• The sum of the same powers of the first n positive integers and the Bernoulli numbers

  91-105

  István Molnár

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  9

  The first part of this paper presents a method to calculate the sum of the same powers of the first n positive integers which is non-recursive and easy to express algorithmically. The application is demonstrated through several problems, for example by calculating the sum of arithmetic progression of degree p. The second part of the paper shows that the discussed procedure can also be used to calculate the Bernoulli numbers, and then, with the help of a known theorem, a link is established between the sum of the same powers of the first n positive integers and the Bernoulli numbers.

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• Cultivating algorithmic thinking: an important issue for both technical and HUMAN sciences

  107-116

  Zoltán Kátai

  Lehel István Kovács

  Zoltán Kása

  Gyöngyvér Márton

  Kinga Fogarasi

  Ferenc Fogarasi

  Views:

  8

  Algorithmic thinking is a valuable skill that all people should master. In this paper we propose a one-semester, algorithm-oriented computer science course for human science students. According to our experience such an initiative could succeed only if the next recipe is followed: interesting and practical content + exciting didactical methods + minimal programming. More explicitly, we suggest: (1) A special, simple, minimal, pseudo-code like imperative programming language that integrates a graphic library. (2) Interesting, practical and problem-oriented content with philosophical implications. (3) Exciting, human science related didactical methods including art-based, inter-cultural elements.

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• Cooperative learning in teaching mathematics: the case of addition and subtraction of integers

  117-136

  Ileana Mate

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  12

  In the course of teaching and learning mathematics, many of the problems are caused by the operations with integers. My paper is a presentation of an experiment by which I tried to make the acquisition of these operations easier through the use of cooperative methods and representations. The experiment was conducted in The Lower-Secondary School of Paptamási from Romania, in the school year 2009-2010. I present the results of the experiment.

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• Conventions of mathematical problems and their solutions in Hungarian secondary school leaving exams

  137-146

  Sándor Kántor

  Anna K. Fazekas

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  1

  Collecting and analyzing the conventions indispensable for interpreting mathematical problems and their solutions correctly assist successful education and objective evaluation. Many professional and didactic questions arose while collecting and analyzing these conventions, which needed clarification, therefore the materials involved concisely in the conventions enrich both the theory and practice of mathematics teaching. In our research we concentrated mainly on the problems and solutions of the Hungarian school leaving examinations at secondary level in mathematics.

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• On two long lasting delusions in the history of equations

  147-158

  Lajos Klukovits

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  10

  Almost everybody was thought, that the 9th century Moshlem mathematician al-Khwarismi was the inventor of two powerful methods – called by him as al-jabr and al-muqabala – in solving quadratic equations. The second belief is that between Leonardo's Liber abaci and Luca Pacioli's Summa... happened nothing interesting in algebra. We will show that both beliefs are false by giving examples from the antiquity and analyzing Mediaeval Italian manuscripits.

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• Report of meeting Researches in Didactics of Mathematics and Computer Sciences: January 28 – January 30, 2011, Satu Mare, Romania

  159-179

  T. Baranyai

  E. Herendiné Kónya

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  6

  The meeting Researches in Didactics of Mathematics and Computer Science was held in Satu-Mare, Romania from the 28th to the 30th of January, 2011. The 46 Hungarian participants – including 34 lecturers and 12 PhD students – came from 3 countries, 14 cities and represented 20 institutions of higher education. The abstract of the talks and the posters and also the list of participants are presented in this report.

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