Abstract

Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns, formulate new conjectures, and establish truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions.

Today, mathematics is used throughout the world as an essential tool in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences. Applied mathematics, the branch of mathematics concerned with application of mathematical knowledge to other fields, inspires and makes use of new mathematical discoveries and sometimes leads to the development of entirely new disciplines. Numerology is considered an application of mathematics by many but differs from mathematics in that is holds a mystical view of numbers. Mathematicians also engage in pure mathematics, or mathematics for its own sake, without having any application in mind, although practical applications for what began as pure mathematics are often discovered later.

It is well known that present mathematics education suffers from serious problems. Prominent among them is the increasing difficulty to motivate students and maintain the interest in the subject that is almost always present at a very young age but which seems to diminish – and often totally disappear as the years go by. Most educational system of today are based on closed, layered architectures of different levels (elementary, intermediate, secondary, high-school, university) with almost no contact between them – especially between the non-adjacent ones. Moreover, in mathematics, the teachers at the early levels often suffer from a lack of understanding of the real nature of the subject – and e.g. often confuse mathematics with arithmetic – while the teachers at the later (university) levels often suffer from a lack of pedagogical interest, which results in various efforts to minimize their teaching ‘duties’. Other shortcomings of the traditional mathematics education architecture include its inability to stimulate interest. Promote understanding, support personalization, facilitate transition between different layers, integrate abstractions with applications, and integrate mathematics with human culture. During the last 20 years, Ambjorn Naeve has developed a pedagogical approach to mathematics education that makes use of ICT in order to address these problems. In various experiments, we have used this approach to demonstrate that it is possible to increase the “cognitive contact” with mathematics in different ways, such as e.g. by clearly expressing the mathematical contexts as well as by visualizing the mathematical concepts and interacting with the forms behind the mathematical formulas. We have also experimented with enhancing the mathematical narrative by showing before proving, proving only when the need for a proof is obvious to the students, and focusing on the historical development of mathematics from a philosophical and history-of-ideas perspective. This paper deals with the identification of web resources for teaching &leaning Geometry at Standard VIII.

Keywords: Mathematics Education, Web resources, Geometry.

[1] Ph.D, Research Scholar, Dept. of Educational Technology, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli.