Comments:Tony Houghton Budapest 2012

From GeoGebra Manual
Jump to: navigation, search

Presentation

Dr Tony Houghton, Education Development Director Cambridge Centre for Innovation in Technological Education (CCITE) From Technophobe to Polymath – a Global learning opportunity with GeoGebra from a UK perspective In the United Kingdom, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) education has been criticised for being too narrow, not having enough specialist teachers and for having too large a dropout rate. Indeed, Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently stated: 'Over the past century the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. There’s been a drift to the humanities - engineering and science aren’t championed. . To change that you need to start at the beginning with education. We need to reignite children’s passion for science, engineering and maths.' It is also a truism that many children and also their teachers, parents, community and society are in fact technophobes. So how do we move them all from technophobe to polymath? The CCITE (Cambridge Centre for Innovation in Technological Education) 20-20 approach is to develop 20 interdisciplinary, collaborative and relevant problem-solving projects for groups of pupils for each year (hence the 20-20 title). Teachers will use their skills as expert educators and facilitators to support and learn alongside their pupils. Pupils will experience first-hand the application of science, mathematics and computing to solving important problems and designing useful artefacts while developing employability skills such as team work and communication. Evaluation will cover both technological achievement and perception. A key tool is GeoGebra - free open-source mathematics software used by approximately 15 million students in 190 countries. There are 122 GeoGebra Institutes in 85 countries, the network coordinate approximately 50 GeoGebra conferences and hundreds of workshops in more than 100 countries, and translated GeoGebra to 62 languages. In addition to being a powerful mathematics software tool, it is therefore a major global learning opportunity. However, by comparison with other countries, GeoGebra is less used in the UK. So, how do we meet the local UK requirement? Initially, 15-year-old students were asked to develop ‘real life’ GeoGebra mathematical software applications of their choice for a wide range of users (both other students and teachers) of varying technical ability and confidence. We are now extending this taking a Human Factors approach to develop a framework and classification for GeoGebra to be deployed within the CCITE 20-20 approach. Global technology projects are briefly described, ranging from Raspberry Pi to zero cost energy bikes, featuring different countries and different partners including Pepsico, DHL, Microsoft and CISCO. These illustrate various aspects of the challenge to: Take a great idea which works somewhere, adapt to meet the local requirement, and above all provide global two-way learning opportunity for communication and collaboration.

Dates & Location

  • Date: 28 Nov 2012, 17:30-18:30
  • Location: Milestone Institute, Bajza utca 44, VI, Budapest, Hungary

Registration

  • Registration in advance required. Please use the Registration form Important note: If you are not able to reach the form, please send your registration request via email to events@geogebra.org!

Tony Houghton Biography

Tony Houghton is Education Development Director Cambridge Centre for Innovation in Technological Education (CCITE). His interest is both in technological achievement and the all-important associated perception of technology. His work is based on his doctoral thesis Expectation Shock, 2005. In summary: (1) It is not just how good something is, it is how good it is perceived to be. (2) This is true both for an individual, a product, a service, a subject and an organisation. (3) You can do simple things to greatly enhance Perception by engagement with people (4) You can measure, benchmark, cost benefit and ‘prove it’ (which got the doctorate:-). Based on this, the Expectation Shock engagement programme has now been deployed across Europe, India, Africa, China and US supporting mixed physical and virtual communities on 100+ projects with hundreds of thousands of users. See Tony Houghton homepage Tony started his career as a teacher, moved to a French human factors consultancy in Paris, then worked with BT as a specialist adviser globally with government and corporate organisations. He has worked with many organisations in a consultancy role ranging from Essex County Council to Coventry University, University College London, University of Cambridge, Specialist Schools Academy Trust, Eurescom, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Pepsico, DHL, Microsoft, CISCO, Chunghwa Telecom, and Sony in Singapore. Tony is an accomplished presenter and has presented at business, technical, educational and academic conferences in Europe, (many) Asia (Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo) and the US (many). His academic work has been published and presented in Europe, Asia and US (including IEEE, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, International Association of Applied Psychology).

Contacts

© 2024 International GeoGebra Institute