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• How do secondary school students from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq understand the concept of function?

  221-244

  Yusuf Fakhraddin Hussein

  Csaba Csíkos

  Views:

  260

  The study investigates secondary school students' understanding of the concept of function. The paper focuses on three main aspects: students' ability to define the concept of function; students' ability to recognize different representations of function; and students' ability to convert between different representations. A test was developed to assess the three main constructs of the study and administered to 342 students in secondary schools in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. According to the results, students have diffculties in recognizing different representations of function and conversion between them. Connections between different parts of the test may provide hints on educational challenges of how to appropriately teach functions.

  Subject Classification: 26Bxx, 97D60

• Teaching student teachers: various components of a complex task

  55-72

  Hans Humenberger

  Hans-Christian Reichel

  Views:

  74

  In this paper we summarize various aspects of teacher training and teaching student teachers (mainly concerning teachers of upper secondary school and High school). We stress several hints and recommendations to better achieve the obviously important aim: they should learn doing, understanding and teaching mathematics!
  Of course, our view is particularly influenced by European traditions, but we think most of them equally apply to teacher training and teaching student teachers elsewhere. Neither is the paper meant to give an all sided overview about the problem field of teacher education as a whole, nor does it contain provocative, completely new ideas. We just want to describe our view of some aspects, based primarily on our personal experience in the mentioned field.

• An interactive animation for learning sorting algorithms: How students reduced the number of comparisons in a sorting algorithm by playing a didactic game

  45-62

  Ladislav Végh

  Veronika Stoffová

  Views:

  148

  Learning programming and understanding algorithms is one of the hardest tasks for novice computer science students. One of the basic algorithms they learn during the introductory programming and algorithms courses are the sorting algorithms. Students like learning these and other algorithms by animations and didactic games, however, these animations are not educationally useful in every case. In this article, we present our educational sorting game, which can be used to introduce the topic of sorting algorithms. The didactic game can be used later too, as a demonstrative tool for explaining the more efficient, quicksort algorithm. We conducted a pedagogical experiment, in which we examined the process of development of sorting algorithms by students while they used the mentioned didactic game. The results showed that students were able to create an algorithm to solve the sorting problem, and they improved its effectiveness by reducing the number of comparisons in the algorithm. They were also able to understand the importance of the efficiency of algorithms when we demonstrated them the quicksort algorithm using the same tool after the experiment.

• On four-dimensional crystallographic groups

  391-404

  Eszter Horváth

  Views:

  99

  In his paper [12] S. S. Ryshkov gave the group of integral automorphisms of some quadratic forms (according to Dade [6]). These groups can be considered as maximal point groups of some four-dimensional translation lattices in E^4. The maximal reflection group of each point group, its fundamental domain, then the reflection group in the whole symmetry group of the lattice and its fundamental domain will be discussed. This program will be carried out first on group T. G. Maxwell [9] raised the question whether group T was a reflection group. He conjectured that it was not. We proved that he had been right. We shall answer this question for other groups as well. Finally we shall give the location of the considered groups in the tables of monograph [4]. We hope that our elementary method will be useful in studying linear algebra and analytic geometry. Futhermore, 4-dimensional geometry with some visualisation helps in better understanding important concepts in higher-dimensional mathematics, in general.