Search

To many students, mathematics has only tenuous connections to their everyday lives and personal concerns. Therefore, current educational reform emphasizes teachers adopting curriculum activities that connect mathematics to student's lives. The view project at the Technical Education Research Center combines new video and computer tools to bring math and students together in previously impossible ways. With these tools, students explore and analyze their own experiences by making measurements on videos of real phenomena. Video allows them to slow down or speed up time, associated computer tools let them analyze events they have actually observed. By making measurements on single frames of video, students can explore the "fine structure" of actions that take place quickly, like bouncing balls or flying paper airplanes. They can examine patterns of motion through video analysis of their own bodies in such activities as sports and dance. The innovation that makes this vision possible is called CamMotion. Using CamMotion to make measurements on the video, students construct meaningful connections between their own motions and conventional mathematical representations.