Since the early 1990s members of the mathematics education community have been developing classroom activities that portray a social constructivist image of mathematics. We call such an activity, along with the classroom organization and exploration tools provided, a mathematical environment. In a mathematical environment students build mathematics through investigation, conjecturing, debate, and mathematical conversations. At Queen's University we have developed and tested a number of mathematical environments for Grades 7 and 8. In 2001, with funding provided by the Imperial Oil Charitable Foundation, we began a project to move this work to the Web.

In math-towers students are presented with problems to explore, tools to support investigation, and communication facilities for sharing their thinking. For a fuller explanation of the philosophy driving the development of math-towers and an overview of the site click below

math-towers: Philosophy & Overview

Future Development

At this time we have completed the tower structure for one investigation, "pool hall math", and students from six Grades 7 and 8 classes are presently exploring this environment.

More Towers
The tower structure that we have developed is independent of the problems and related investigation tools. We plan to create other towers using problems that divide into levels, assigning a level to each floor of a tower. For each problem situation the tower hall will contain specific introductory instructions and the labs will have appropriate tools to support exploration.

Research
Along with the tower structure we have developed facilities to support research into student use of the site and their learning. We can regularly capture the student input; the cases they have tested, observations recorded, and conclusions drawn. With this data it will be possible to replay and analyse student interaction with the site. We also plan to video tape student groups as they visit math-towers to capture off-line interactions and to interview participants to assess the learning resulting from their math-towers experience.

Invitation
You are invited to join the math-towers adventure as a "Grade 7 or 8 student". We believe that off-computer conversation is valuable for the building of understanding and thus in the classroom situation we suggest that teachers have students explore math-towers in groups of 2 or 3. For this Working Meeting this is not possible and each of you received an individual user name and password in a recent e-mail. Please locate your user name and password and then click on the link below to visit math-towers.ca

To www.math-towers.ca