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Calculators Help in Teaching and Learning

Alexander Temnov
evg7@mail.ru
Secondary School ¹ 918
Russia

Abstract

Development in calculating skills of our pupils sometime is a tedious job but it s necessary element of mathematical education. Graphic programming calculators which are considered to be usfull tools for secondary and high school students can be helpfull in teaching and learning even earlier - in primary school. I drew this conclusion after my school colleagues, primary school teachers, had tested the software I prepared for this type of calculators in their practice. These teaching and tutorial programmes for such calculators as CFX-9850G from CASIO were intended for grade 1 pupils learning counting, and studying how subsequent and preceding figures relate to each other. As usual, some of the pupils were quick in learning educational material, or they had better preschool background, while others were slower. Putting calculators into practice was especially helpful for the latest pupils, and the teachers noticed that individual capabilities of their pupils could be accounted more effectively. After this the programme library was filled up with software intended to assist pupils in learning multiplication table, addition and subtraction of three digit numbers, their multiplication and division. In my teaching practice I use software I ve created myself for enhancing calculating skills of junior and senior secondary school pupils. There is a variety of tutorial programmes in the existing library, e.g. developed for addition and multiplication of positive and negative numbers, percent calculations and proportions, finding roots of liniar equations and finding roots of square equations using try and error method based on Viette s theorem. Any of these programmes can be easily modified into a testing one to record pupils performance one would like to examine for assessment. Well-developed calculating skills are required for pupils when they solve problems on physics, chemistry, etc. My pupils find this kind of educational activity to be one of the means of updating our teaching and learning culture. During our extracurricula periods curious pupils learn also how to create programmes and acquire practice in programming and algorithmization of solutions of various problems, in mathematical modeling of different phenomena, for instance, Browian motion, simple harmonic motion, light phenomena.


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