On the occasion of the International Day of Mathematics, Deputy Minister for Education Katarzyna Lubnauer spoke about government plans to use innovative methods in education, in particular to "remove the fear from mathematics".
Lubnauer pointed to surveys indicating that fear is a major factor blocking children from learning in mathematics.
One area of innovative methods that is particularly relevant to mathematics and which was on display in a class attended by the deputy minister was an "online exercise book". Educational programs are able to check which areas of mathematics the student has mastered and offer more difficult questions, or the opposite - go over more basic ground when the student shows by their mistakes that they are not ready to move on.
This is particularly useful in mathematics for at least two reasons. Given the cumulative nature of the subject, it is important to master one "level" before moving on to the next. Related to this is the fact that students of different levels are difficult to teach together. For one student the problem is "impossible" while for another it is "trivial".
This is a similar situation to language learning which is also usually taught in groups, divided according to level. Educational computer programs help by allowing students to move at their own pace, personalising the educational process.
In fact methods of this kind have been around for a long time before the current vogue for talk of "artificial intelligence". A program for learning vocabulary called SuperMemo has been developed since 1985, one of the main designers being Piotr Wożniak from Poland. This program was in turn based on much earlier research into long-term memory.
Sources: PAP, International Day of Mathematics website, antimoon.com
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