 Thanks very much This is transitioning to a assessment in mathematics education. So my name. This is a joint project between UCC and University College Cork and CIT Cork Institute of Technology My name is Tom Carroll My colleague here in Malcron was to be here today, but he I think he's after getting held up at an earlier meeting So he sends his apologies Then in CIT. We have on any hay and Julie Crowley and they are The if you like the CIT half of this of this group So our our main project name is our goal is to we are we want to use A tool called numbers which has been developed at the University of Newcastle We want to use that to integrate e-assessment and e-feedback, I guess as well into Existing courses at at UCC and CIT. That's our that's our goal These courses are in mathematics and statistics for initially So we want to we have two if you like themes to our our plan We implementation so that's the phase that we're in at the moment and also evaluation and for that What we asked the forum for was to was for an intern who really a project assistant who would primarily create contact on the content. I mean on the number system and If for these particular courses and then a student who would be a master student and the student then would be Do the help us with the evaluation? So that's really the the overview of the project So the the our high-level goals if you like so we want to improve student engagement We want to improve students understanding of mathematics their appreciation of mathematics We're very much working with students who are going to be maybe in in as in the last Talk who are going to be in large classes not necessarily studying mathematics for the sake of it So in other words many of these students will have done their leaving certificate Thought that they were done with maths now They've gone to college and they're doing geology or biology or chemistry whatever it may be and suddenly there they are There's another maths course to do We want to improve their core mathematics skills And I'll talk a little bit more later about the general context for that coming out of second level And of course we want to manage lecture workload. This is this is Something that needs to be done as well We want if you like it's a soft goal if you wish But we want to to strengthen the relationship between maths at UCC and maths at CIT and of course in time to broaden that as well And this is I'm glad to say is already already happening So the implementation phase in from UCC point of view, right? We haven't been using numbers up until up until now, right? We are developing content for use in two particular courses They used to be called maths methods now they're called under semesterization Their names changed to calculus for scientists one and two So these would have about five hundred students plus in them coming from lots of different sign of this general science type degrees so at CIT numbers is already being used in some business for statistics statistics for business even courses and again with large numbers of students that they're dealing with and They have now integrated Numbers into their into their semester two modules the the general feedback so far from that seems to be that The the students like the work that they're doing with numbers They like what they're doing with mathematics in these kind of tutorials and assessments But there is there is a different I guess there's potentially a difficulty with this Translating into success in the end of year end of module summative assessments, right? And that is perhaps a natural thing Now so we have a project assistant now I suppose initially in our project proposal part We wanted was one per one project assistant who would work with us for two years and to give that give us their Undivided attention that perhaps would maybe slightly unrealistic. So now what we are doing is we are Hiring different people to do different things depending on when they are free and when they are available and is still working out fine Then we have this master's studentship who will be really working on the evaluation and we have a project description for that It's being advertised and I'm glad to say yesterday. We're even starting to get some Applications, which is nice and we've a closing date of 31st of July. I'll say more about that maybe at the end Outcomes We have identified some of the key topics and they would be familiar to many of us with students struggle that used to see and at CIT Statistics descriptive statistics. So not so much given this data make a histogram, but here's a histogram. Can you interpret it? Can you answer these the draw? Can you extract this information what you from what you are shown? Probability connection between relative frequency and probability understanding in the context of a Particular setting what the outcomes are what the events are what the sample space is all these kinds of things are Difficult for students. So something that we'd like to work on Now at the moment we have this ongoing assessment in CIT for large classes maths and stats classes And we're developing as I said this new material for UCC and we have if you like how do you say modified The module the formal module description so that all these can take place next year Well next year is the second of September 7th of September So let me just show you some of the things that That some of the types of questions and what numbers looks like a little bit and some of these are very are very Straightforward very innocent looking things and that's what they are. I mean that you have to do It's not all Fanciness, so these are just very simple things with numbers the students are asked to do here They can type in their answer what they come out with as their answer and they they can be to Immediately know whether they did it right or did it wrong they get it wrong They can ask for another to see try another question like this one They can keep doing things until they feel confident that now they get it and they're able to do things Here is so this is a more an algebraic one you have some X's no Y's which X's simplify this and Numbers is nice in that it is quite forgiving in terms of the Of the way in which students input their their answer, right? So it's it they don't they don't have to learn a particular syntax They're the barrier for there's a very very low barrier for getting into using this as a student And it's and you can do this you can do this the assessments of course are different But you can do this from one's laptop while you're you're on the bus going home from college, right? It's just you just need to log in you don't need to log in you just need to connect and you're in This is a more comp maybe a different another one that's been used at CIT So this is about a Poisson random variable people coming into a shop How many come in a particular particular hour and they're asked to figure out the the value of lambda Which is the determining thing for the Poisson random variable and there has to do some computations here and figure out some probabilities Here is another type of one. It shows here. They're oh, yes, this is about annuities and pensions yes becoming ever more important as time goes on and Here for example now you begin to see that you know numbers has a lot of functionality which is what we really want to be able to give ourselves That's what this project is doing. It's giving us and a project assistant Oh, the time to have ideas and the project assistants a time to implement them, right? That's that that's really this is about numbers. There's a lot of functionality He can give advice to students the student can try to get the answer Then if they don't get things right then they can say please can I have some advice? Of course that advice is written by us Yes, and they can have it they can get more advice if they need more advice, etc, etc So this is almost like a mini tutorial on how to do this kind of problem, right? So that's fair enough then. Oh, this will be interesting Then we were thinking to ourselves. Okay, but what can really can numbers do as now as we go forward? What what can we get it to do is are there are there barriers to this or does it always have to be little questions like this? How do you do this? Okay? right so So we asked ourselves, okay, if we really wanted as maths if we really oh I can see it, but why can't you see it? Oh dear? How I love technology? Our point that one feedback This is the one I'll try clicking on it again. You don't see that I Don't know how to make you see it Does anybody know about technology here Yeah Isn't it great. This is being a broadcast live. Yes to the universe. Why do I volunteer? I Have two of them now. You see I look oh Thank you. Good man. That's great. Thank you. Well done. You don't go too far away So he asked what could this potentially do so okay in probability You have the normal distribution the bell-shaped curve. Why this is not a question This is just like something the students can play with and maybe learn something about so all right One now. What do you have? Okay, I Can't find the cursor this all work perfectly when we were in car Where did you find it? In the middle really oh That's green. Ah, oh, thank you very much So mu is the mean of your normal distribution if you move you can change the mean along this bar And you see the distribution moves to the left and the right, but it doesn't change shape if I change Sigma which is the standard deviation. I can make sigma smaller that makes the distribution tighter It gets more peaked and then if you make sigma bigger the distribution becomes flatter And it becomes more spread out and you can see that at the same time when you let go of the cursor the What's generated down here on the bottom or let's say a hundred random points from the distribution you see that you get a lot more points in the Middle where there's a lot of probability Where there's a lot of things and then you get fewer points out in the tails Which are the less likely outcomes you also get up here on the top you get the It can't listen standard deviation of the points in the mean of the points So you can make con and you know for you this is just a demonstration, right? You could have a confidence interval showing where the mean is and how and all these kinds of things So we thought that if we want if we were able to do a question a type of question like this We might have to do it in say for example Mathematica and import that into numbers But it turns out that this can be all done directly in JavaScript directly on numbers So these are the things that can be done and I think if you can do this you can pretty much do anything Three minutes. Thank you now. I have to make my presentation come back This is not a Mac Can you make it get bigger oh Maybe that's this one. All right. That's fine. Oh, yes. Sorry now. It's begun. This is very strange. Okay So a little bit about national we are sorry about the three minutes and I've wasted up all the time The context in which we are working here is a context where students now are doing a new mathematics curriculum at second level Which is you know, I'm not going to say what I think about it But no, I know I'm not I mean I don't mean that in any any any negative way But it is very controversial a lot of people have a lot of different opinions on project maths for example And they're in Ireland. There's always an awful lot of discussion about mathematics It's been happening in the last few weeks because we've had the leaving certificate We've had headlines in the national newspapers like such as fury over ordinary level mathematics paper fury Yes, this is an article from the Irish Times talking about Oh, they've done this and this you won't be able to see this again So this is an article from the Irish Times says project maths linked to decline in third level performance it talks about a Diagnostic test run at the University of Limerick and it compares the results of students in that diagnostic test with their Grade from mathematics coming in from second level and the negative correlation between the two growing negative correlation between the two So, you know, there is a lot of of no, sorry Where is my nice? Well, I can see it here. Yes So sorry about this There's a disconnect between the two National impact a little bit about national impact So at the moment we've had some local dissemination of what we've been doing at UCC So UCC had a digital day there on the 6th of December, which was very widely attended by the across the University And that too, you'll be glad to know was broadcast to to the universe We had local we have local interest already at UCC is and CIT in expanding the use of numbers So already I have colleagues who's who are saying can this be done in my comma? Can I use this in my first commerce course because that's got 250 students and I don't know what to do with them all Colleagues in CIT saying could we use this in accounting and of course you can Numbers, okay, maybe has you know, maybe initially used for for mathematics But there's no reason why you can't you have accounting type questions. I use that functionality there There is a lot of interest. I think this is clear to everybody here. There is a lot of interest in Ireland on how on the the teaching of mathematics for service teaching as well Which is really what I'm talking about and for example, this is demonstration There's an annual conference in maths and stats service teaching and learning which is something we would like to be in more involved with We have contact with the Irish mathematics teachers Association, which links us in which second level for example And so in fact our we had an application yesterday from for our mass research masters from Recently graduated secondary school teacher coming through yes through contact with this organization We need to develop and I admit this in enhanced web presence And we need to in time expand this beyond UCC and CIT. Okay, so I'll stop there and I apologize for the technical glitches