SMILIE Maths Com'eT
SMILIE (Some Maths In Life In Europe) Maths Com'eT is a Comenius project lasting two years coordinated by the teacher Carmen Belén Muñoz Carmona from the IES José Navarro y Alba school (Archidona, Andalucía) in collaboration with seven schools in France, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom.
The project aims to design and develop mathematical activities centred in the realm of functions and geometry, with a clear application to daily life, integrating other areas of the curriculum like Physics and Foreign Languages. The final product is a wiki, in the project TwinSpace, which presents all the mathematical activities and problems proposed by the students which have been designed and solved by mixed nationality working groups.
One of the most outstanding aspects of the project is the clear distribution of tasks among the partner countries which has enabled the smooth development of each of the project phases. The working and communication language has been English.
The students have collaborated, sometimes on line and sometimes in the classroom, taking advantage of the Comenius visits. The outcome of this active collaboration has been the practical workshops on mathematical problem solving and the use of Geogebra, the cultural visits paying attention to the mathematical aspects observed in the architecture of buildings, the mathematical dictionaries, as well as the creation of videos and posters in which the students describe the process they have followed to resolve the different problems set for the groups.
The TwinSpace has been used to share materials, documentation and the planning of the Comenius project, as well as the different measures taken to disseminate the information at each stage of development. All the material created, as mentioned before, is located in an internal wiki. The whole work process as well as the visits to the schools is well documented in Timetoast, so that it constitutes a work model which can clearly be reused by other teachers in future. The same can be said of the specific material presented in the wiki, a valuable data base of 150 mathematical problems with open access accompanied by the solutions found by the students themselves.
The project has achieved the involvement, in each of the participating countries, of the school community and the institutions belonging to the local authorities and has been dissminated through the local press.
From the NSS we congratulate the participating teachers and pupils for promoting an innovative model for learning mathematics with applications in real life, ably combining team work, the use of a foreign language as the communication support and the encouragement of a common European identity. Congratulations to all of you.
Image source: the project TwinSpace.
