INTERACTIVE MATHEMATICS TEXTS ACROSS THE UNDERGRADUATE CURRICULUM

There are many approaches to the use of technology in academics; some more successful than others. Ultimately, the success of any approach has to do not only with curriculum development, but also with putting powerful tools in the hands of educators to create innovative curricula in the mathematical sciences. The increasingly versatile and affordable technologies have opened new doors for the design and development of interactive mathematics and science texts. These are lessons, laboratories, simulations, explorations, and exercises that are designed to be read by students on a computer. What distinguishes them from the ordinary texts is the support they give to participation, visualization, and integration. Participation refers to the active involvement of students in the construction of their own knowledge. Visualization refers to the formation of stable and coherent pictures of abstract constructions and processes. The ability to visualize constructions and processes requires practice and experience. Instructional technology with its heuristic tools can provide real support for visualization. Integration is the process by which students build bridges connecting principal ideas of different disciplines, and place them into a unified conceptual context. So it has to do with synthesis and organization. Interactive texts as described above provide for a genuine contextually based learning environment. Such an environment gives students not only the tools that support their learning but also their communication of such learning. In order to develop successful interactive texts, the type of technologies to be used must be judiciously chosen so that the distance an educator must traverse from a design idea to a dynamic interaction is minimized. At the same time, to provide the desired heuristic support, it is necessary that the computer environment and its language recede into the background and put students face to face with stories that develop important mathematical and scientific ideas.