About Motivate

Motivate is a unique and exciting videoconferencing project!
It all began in May 1997, when a school in London wondered how they might make use of videoconferencing equipment which was lying in a cupboard just gathering dust. The first Motivate VC linked students from several London and Norfolk schools with two Cambridge mathematicians, Dr Ruth Williams and Dr Susan Pitts, in a conference on Geometry and Gravity and on Probability. Since those early days, many hundreds of schools and many thousands of students - the youngest just starting school, the oldest about to leave for university - from several different countries have participated in our conferences.
We now run day and month-long conferences, long projects which start in September/October and run for a full school year,maths days and shorter sessions tailored to the participating schools' requirements, and professional development sessions and courses.
Our videoconferences link schools with other schools in the UK and internationally and with professional mathematicians, scientists, teachers ... in fact anyone who has a good story to tell which has a mathematical basis! Many of our conferences also have a significant cross-curricular content.
Pedagogical objectives

to enrich the mathematical experience of school students
to broaden their mathematical horizons
to give them an experience of collaborative working on mathematical and cross-curricular tasks
to provide a wide range of resources on a variety of mathematical topics for students of all ages
to provide a mathematical community to which students can present their work and with which they can engage in discussion of their own and other's research
to raise students' aspirations
to improve mathematical thinking and communication skills

Other objectives

to evaluate our conferences
to help schools set up and establish videoconferencing as an educational medium
to help students and teachers to work with the VC medium in a way that makes best use of its affordances
to use the feedback we are given to inform what we do and to develop and reflect on best practice
to contribute to debate on relevant pedagogical and technical issues

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