Developing Geometry Software for Exploration---Geometry Player

Abstract

As school teachers, difficulties often occur when we integrate technology into mathematical teaching. Lack of tangible examples and shared resources are possible reasons. We strongly believe that electronic digital materials for teaching and leaning should help the teachers present mathematical concepts more clearly, and they can be used to provide interactive environments so that students have chances to explore mathematical concepts and foster conceptual understanding.

As we all know, Flash has been a powerful tool to create animations on the web. We can design innovative and vital animations with Flash in the Internet. And we find that with its strong functions, Flash ActionScript could be used to create highly interactive software. But Flash is the product designed for creating interactive webs. As a user, we also find it is inconvenient when we use Flash to develop electronic digital materials for geometry explorations. In this study, we create a math function library to help developing geometry digital materials. We also use it to build a series of math interactive symbols and make Flash a useful tool to design geometry digital materials. Finally a geometry software called Geometry Player was developed to help teachers design and create learning environments for students' learning. It provides environment to manipulate geometry objects directly. It is simple and easy to use the tools in Geometry Player to build and construct dynamic geometry figures. They can manipulate and observe changes of dynamic geometry figures to construct the geometry concepts by themselves. In this presentation, some explorative activities developed by Geometry Player will be shared.