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MOTIVATE presentation for IMECT2 (2000)by Helen Joyce (with Prof John Webb, Mr Neil Eddy and Mr Yusuf Johnson) On this page:Introduction IntroductionThis session is devoted to the MOTIVATE project (Maths Opportunities Through Internet, Videoconferencing And inTeractive Education) and has two aims.
We hope you will be inspired by what you hear, and that some of you will be tempted to try some of this exciting new technology yourselves, either in your own videoconferencing programmes - "mini-MOTIVATEs" - or by becoming involved in the MOTIVATE programme. Before I go any further, now that I have brought up the possibility of you being involved, I should really say more about that possibility. Although we have chosen schools for the academic year 2000-2001, if you would like to be involved in the following year, 2001-2001, then fill in a form and let us know! However, note that MOTIVATE centres should be located in disadvantaged areas, or consist of disadvantaged schools - maybe socially disadvantaged, or maybe lacking good facilities in some other way. Our brief is to work with those who most need it. If this isn't you, there are still ways to become involved. As you will hear, a significant amount of material is available on our website. This material can be used in a stand-alone manner, or at the same time as a MOTIVATE session is running - students can participate using our MOTIVATE webboard and our AskAMathematician service. Some of the schools involved in MOTIVATE this year have used the material in a lunchtime maths club run by their teacher, which is attended by children from different years. This is a good example of a way the MOTIVATE material can be used by people other than those directly involved in the project. We hope to videostream MOTIVATE sessions in future years - our sponsors, NESTA, have asked us to look into using Internet technology in the programme roll-out. Soon, we hope, many people can "listen and watch in" on conferences via their computers. We will be acting as a "dating service" for schools who would like contacts with whom they can videoconference - no restrictions here on type of school, or even on subject area. If you have videoconferencing facilities, would like to add your contact details to a list of schools looking for other schools to videoconference with, then fill in a form. You may think, well, this still isn't me. Not so. Most schools are now online, and anyone online can join in MOTIVATE. Also, as I'll be mentioning again, the most basic forms of videoconferencing are actually really cheap and accessible - all you need is a PC, NetMeeting, which is freeware and can be downloaded from the web, a cheap webcam (£50 upwards) and someone with the same kit to conference with. Although the full power of videoconferencing isn't available this way, schools can "taste" videoconferencing very cheaply, and then decide whether to invest further. So almost no one can say, "I couldn't do that". Well, all of that was jumping the gun a little. Now I should tell you something about the project. MOTIVATE is a videoconferencing scheme to provide an interactive forum bringing exceptional mathematicians into direct contact with school pupils from disadvantaged areas. The year 1999-2000 has been the first year of three to be funded by NESTA - the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. NESTA has a brief to promote excellence, and so MOTIVATE is focussed on more mathematically able children.
The way the MOTIVATE programme worksEach MOTIVATE conference is in fact two - a Launch conference and a Talkback conference. At each conference, three centres are linked - the mathematician, at the videoconferencing suite in Cambridge, and two school centres. At each school centre there are five representatives from each of five schools. Each school is twinned with a school from the other centre.
The Launch conferenceAt the Launch conference, a mathematician located at the videoconferencing suite in Cambridge University talks briefly about their mathematical life and what maths means to them. The students also introduce themselves and their schools to each other. When the ice has been broken in this way, the mathematician talks on an area of maths students would not normally meet in school and sets tasks for the students. Time is allowed for the students to ask questions.
Between the Launch and Talkback conferencesThe central element of the MOTIVATE programme is the work the students do themselves. Mathematics is a subject with a long gestation time - very few of us are quick enough of understanding to follow an exposition of a new topic and immediately come up with insightful comments and questions. We need to allow our thoughts to mature, to try things ourselves, and to rephrase, in our own words, the information we've been given. A common occurrence during the past year has been that students have not been able to ask many questions of the speakers at the Launch conference - the topic is too new and too unfamiliar, and possibly nerves have made the students silent. However, a month later, after talking amongst themselves and working at their own pace, the students have plenty to say! It can feel discouraging for the speaker during the Launch conference - it's hard to gauge reaction, and hard to feel a sense of connection with the students - but to a large extent it's an unavoidable characteristic of the subject. Each school is "twinned" with a school at the other school centre. Twins are assigned the same tasks as each other, and are encouraged to discuss their progress via email or our webboard. All the pairs of twins work on slightly different, but related, mathematical tasks. Details of the tasks and further information to assist the work are available on this website, designed for printing off and using away from the computer; working online is optional. This also enables classmates and others not directly involved in MOTIVATE to work on the assignments. Students can have their questions answered by the AskNRICH team and discuss their ideas with students in other schools using the MOTIVATE webboard. Each school receives an unedited video of the first conference a few days after that conference, to be reviewed by the participants with their classmates to help them with their work on the assignment. This year, as we have been piloting the programme, the Schools Liaison Officer has visited the schools by arrangement. If students submit the work they have done to NRICH, it will be published on the MOTIVATE website after the Talkback Conference with acknowledgements of names of contributors and schools.
The Talkback conferenceAll the schools present their findings at the Talkback videoconference. Each school of a pair of "twins" presents one half of what they have worked on - so everyone is guaranteed at least one listener who has worked on something similar and will understand. Of course, we hope everyone will understand, but it's nice to know that one other school at least is pretty much guaranteed to understand! Each school gets between five and seven minutes to present what they have done - they may use PowerPoint, or handwritten or typed slides with a document camera. This works in a similar manner to an OHP, except that the image is filmed and sent along the videolink. The students have great freedom to organise their presentation as they see fit, and if they have followed a particular path in their work, rather than sticking rigidly to their brief, that is fine - they just present something of what they have done. When every school has presented their work, the mathematician sums up, drawing together the work all the schools have done and possibly giving some idea of how to take the topic further. If you would like to see some short video clips from the second pair of videoconferences, which were with Dr Helen Mason of DAMTP, click on the image below. The topic was "The Sun and Waves", and the participants were year 12, from five schools in North London. The students you'll hear speaking are from Camden School Sixth Form. First there's a clip of Dr Mason's first conference, and then we'll see part of the students' Talkback presentation. As you'll see, we like to keep the whole proceedings very informal. It's important that there's a feeling of connection and empathy between the people on either end of the videoconference link - otherwise the experience is alienating and scary. The pedagogical rationale behind the programme really needs no explanation to an audience such as yourselves, but nevertheless I'll outline it briefly.
Schools are often unaware of how best to exploit new technology, the worldwide web, and software to enhance pupils' understanding and enthusiasm. These problems are particularly acute in schools that are under-resourced or in disadvantaged areas.
These sorts of schools need direct contact with the MMP, rather than being left to seek out resources themselves. This contact works both ways, as they can give practical feedback on what provision by the MMP can assist them most effectively.
Why use videoconferencing technology to address these issues?Well, this is a question that is often asked of all sorts of new technology. Anyone using anything other than chalk and talk will inevitably find that they must defend themselves against people who say "in my day all we had was blahbedyblah and it was good enough for us". Of course, someone who comes to a conference with "International Mathematics Enrichment with Communication Technology" as its title must already be a convert, but all the same it does no harm to answer such critics explicitly. At the very least it helps us to clarify our thinking regarding the benefits new technology can bring, and helps us guard against change for change's sake, and against innovation which brings insufficient benefits to outweigh the resources consumed.
Videoconferencing, to state the obvious, enables face-to-face contact between people in remote locations
One difficulty in quantifying the benefits of using very modern technology is that inertia and significant startup costs in time and money militate against change. These initial difficulties must be considerably discounted if a fair comparison is to be made between an old and a new way of doing things. If a new way is adopted, it will become the old way soon enough, and the inertia that worked so hard against it before will soon be working for it. The way I would therefore like to phrase the question is: Without too onerous startup costs, can a videoconferencing project produce significant improvements in
Specifically, does MOTIVATE achieve these aims? By clicking on the image below, you can watch a video (about ten minutes long) of some of the comments made by students who were involved in MOTIVATE this year. These students are at John Kelly Girls Technology College and Camden School Sixth Form, both in North London. Now I want to pick up on a couple of the points made by these students. In maths there is a huge gap between what must be done to learn the subject and what it is to actually practise the discipline itself. Learning the alphabet is quite different from writing a novel, and learning to add is quite different from proving a theorem. In maths, unlike other subjects, this gap stays wide right until the end of school. The seven-year old writing "what I did on my holidays" and the fifteen-year old doing a science experiment are doing the same things as a Booker prize winner and a Nobel prize winner - just at a very different level. However, learning basic algebra, say, or even differentiation techniques, is quite different from proving a theorem - to the extent that mathematicians must get used to people asking, "what do mathematicians do - very big sums?" No one asks a novelist what their work involves... The unfortunate fact for those of us who love mathematics, and would like other people to do so also, is that the equivalent of learning the alphabet lasts much longer in mathematics than in any other subject. The result is that the great majority of people think maths is boring, and even some very mathematically able children think that it is repetitive and uncreative. There is nothing more creative than proving a new result - but that is an experience that is utterly invisible to most of the population, even the highly numerate and mathematically able population. Able children may therefore decide that other subjects are more interesting and offer more scope for their talents, which is fine if it is a free and informed decision - not everyone must be a mathematician! - but a tragedy if based on a mistaken idea of what maths is. This is where a project like MOTIVATE comes into its own. If you want to know what a profession entails, nothing beats talking to a professional in that discipline, and then trying to do something in that discipline yourself. The students involved in MOTIVATE this year had the opportunity to meet a respected research mathematician and to get an idea of what doing maths entails. They also carried out what were in effect original pieces of research, on topics that are quite current. Until you start doing independent work, maths is seen as something where your teacher knows the answers and you sit on your own, repeating the methods you've been taught until you get the answer that you're meant to get. The open-endedness, the sense of collaboration, and the freedom to organize their material in whatever way seems best to them, to search out material and assistance using their own initiative, certainly made the experience nearer to the everyday life of a mathematician than anything else the students had ever done. They rightly recognised the quality of their work, and were proud of their achievements. The other point that came up again and again was how much the students, particularly the girls, liked working in a group. Maths is often seen as a solitary subject, and one in which people compete to improve their rankings on some very precise scale. This goes hand-in-hand with the belief that mathematics is mechanical, not creative - it is much harder to attach precise rankings to creative achievements than to mechanical ones. Of course, in an academic environment, much work is collaborative - even more in other subjects than in mathematics - and, certainly in mathematics, undertaken for the pure love of the subject. It is the done thing to appreciate and admire the achievements of others. In this way too, then, the students involved in MOTIVATE experienced something close to the environment of an academic research institute. They very much enjoyed working in a group, towards a longer-term goal, in a collaborative and less competitive way. They admired other people's achievements and achieved in a less hierarchical structure.
The online side of MOTIVATEOnce a speaker has agreed to do a conference, the next thing we have to do is arrange to get an article on their topic from them for our website. This article usually doesn't go online until the day before the conference, so it's not assumed that the students have read it before the conference. As well as the article, the speaker must produce five problem sets - with attention to the need to keep the problems open-ended, and also (often difficult for university lecturers) at the right level for a younger audience. Most of the speakers are quite nervous about using the new medium of videoconferencing to give a talk - they are denied their usual methods of judging how the talk is going, and gauging audience reaction, and are also worried that slides and suchlike won't be visible. It can feel like your talk is some sort of "message in a bottle" - for all you know, the connection could have gone down, and you could be talking to yourself! Of course this is not so, but all the same reassurances are needed. As well as reassurance, there are practical guidelines to be given - all writing should be large enough and bold enough to be seen, unnecessary movement, for example, waving a hand over a slide, should be eliminated, and so on. During the month between the two videoconferences, we try to find some interesting websites with related material, to link to from our MOTIVATE site. Sometimes this is easy, because we already have a PASS/PLUS article on the topic (http://pass.maths.org), or a related problem in a past issue of the NRICH online magazine. Where appropriate, we also try to provide LOGO programs and Java applets, to help the students on their way, and deepen the material for other users of the site. After the TALKBACK conference, we are willing to put students' work online, if they send it to us. A couple of the speakers have also provided us with follow-up articles, going into the subject in more depth, or providing feedback on the work done by the students. A recent innovation has been to provide streamed clips from the conferences online - and this is something we hope to be developing further.
This year's speakers, topics, and participantsThis year the topics and speakers were
Three South African delegates at IMECT2, all of whom were involved in MOTIVATE last year, were kind enough to contribute some comments on their participation in the programme. Professor John Webb of Cape Town University, who is visiting the MMP for six months, was our final speaker of this year's programme. He spoke to Year 9 students in Brent and Slough on the topic "Mathematical Surprises". Through his kind offices we were also able to do a three-way videoconference with speaker Dr John Haigh of Sussex University, and Year 8 school centres in Brent and at the Cape Town Exploratorium. The involvement of Cape Town students was very exciting for all of us, and also, I think, for the children in London. It was partly supported by Telkom, the South African telecommunications company. Neil Eddy and Yusuf Johnson are teachers at Pinelands High School and Grassy Park High School respectively, which two schools were involved in the Year 8 videoconference.
John Webb, August 2000
Neil Eddy, August 2000
Yusuf Johnson, August 2000
The future for MOTIVATENext year we plan six pairs of conferences, all three-way between Cambridge and two school centres, at each of which will be representatives from five schools. Therefore there is the possibility to use up to twelve different school centres, although in practice it probably won't be that many until the following year. We will again use Cape Town, Brent and Slough, and will be collaborating with centres in Belfast, Glasgow, Birmingham and Bristol and Madras. We will be using the twinning model in every pair of conferences, and hope that as time goes by, schools will feel that the interaction with their twin is a rich part of the programme. The main thrust of the MOTIVATE programme will continue to be these three-way conferences, with speakers from the academic community, and students presenting work on the conference topic at the TALKBACK conference. However, we also hope to facilitate point-to-point work via MOTIVATE - possibly supporting schools in maintaining contact with their twins, via videoconference if the schools in question have the facilities, or else via email and our webboard. Another possibility would be to support the schools in meeting again at their regional centres to have a two-way videoconference between themselves without a third link to Cambridge, possibly with application-sharing (as was discussed in the IMECT2 choice session run by Graeme Brown and Joan Zorn). Follow-up work could be done on the conference tasks, or year groups or students not involved in the original conference could meet via videoconference and collaborate. For this sort of activity we will be offering support and expertise, however the initiative will need to come from the regional centres, and arrangements to be made by them. Point-to-point work between schools with videoconferencing facilities can be much less expensive and technologically challenging than larger videoconferences, as they can be done using NetMeeting, which is freeware, and the only purchase needed on top of a computer, which can be used for other purposes, is a webcam which costs no more than £50. (I should point out that this method only allows two or three users on either end of the link, rather than connecting entire classrooms effectively, and unwanted third parties may attempt to intrude.) This sort of conferencing is really a way to try out videoconferencing without any serious commitment of resources, and as such is a quite rich possibility for roll-out of MOTIVATE. With the constant improvements to bandwidth and online videostreaming, real-time videos running over the web are becoming more feasible by the month. We envisage that many people all over the world will soon be able to watch MOTIVATE lectures streamed over the internet - they will not be able to interact live, but can collaborate using email and our webboard. Already half-hour videos of the MOTIVATE lectures can be watched on this website using RealPlayer, which is freeware. In this way, MOTIVATE can be rolled out to a practically unlimited audience - as well as the primary participants at the school centres, anyone with an internet connection will be able to follow the action and do some mathematics. Something we are keeping in mind is that MOTIVATE is a pilot project, intended to show the way for other disciplines and other mathematics projects. There is no reason why similar projects cannot be run in other subject areas, learning from our experience. Especially at the moment, when videoconferencing equipment is a major investment for a school, it makes sense to use it across many departments. Again because it is such a major investment, not too many schools have it, and by being involved in MOTIVATE schools can meet other schools who also have the equipment and collaborate with them across many departments. In an informal way, we can try to act as a clearing-house for other speakers and subjects, if only by pointing committed individuals towards each other.
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