Electronic Mathematics Laboratory Equipment

Introduction - Emle

Emle - Electronic Mathematics Laboratory Equipment has the mathematics equivalent of physical science lab equipment. Unlike the physical science classes where a student can have hands on experience with physical entities to directly reinforce the concepts taught, the mathematics classes after simple counting do not have this advantage. This site introduces the use of electronic laboratory equipment for the mathematics classroom. Key words: virtual manipulatives.

This use of electronic equipment allows pure math concepts without getting entangled in the details of an application-based exercise. While applications have a valid use, they are limited to those areas in which all of the students have some understanding. Also, the details of the application can overwhelm the pure math concepts.

Most of the student's instruction time is consumed in the reading of the textbook and completion of the problem sets which are pre-printed. The at-the-board instruction by the teacher can be more dynamic, but is limited by the tools of the trade. For example, the necessary skill of perceiving that 1/4, .25, 25% and a quarter of a pie slice are the same is not easily absorbed by some. There has not been an implement that lets the student get their hands on the textual symbols "1/4", "25%" and ".25" and  the graphic of a quarter of a pie slice to see how they change in relationship to each other.

Please contact me if you find these useful, have comments or with bug reports.

Emle 2.4-6

Currently this version is only expected to work with Firefox and the Sugar Browse Activity. The browser that I have been using for this exercise is:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092510 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.3

Emle has an index that lists all of the languages and labs. With this version of Emle, support for OLPC - One Laptop Per Child user interface Sugar has been added. In order for Emle to conform to what is required by the Sugar collection standard the directory structure, file naming convention and meta data files have been changed.

Modified 30-Oct-2008.




http://emle.sf.net      emleXJulianLocals.com[Replace the "X" with "@"]