Abstract
Nowadays, mathematics education providing challenging, interesting, interactive and technology-oriented learning experiences to students attracts attention both in research and practice. Among those experiences, competitions, due to their role of integrating the interest and desire of students to compete in education, challenging their potentials and facilitating their adaptation to daily life, are notable issues. In that sense, in the present study, it was aimed to explore the contest-related views of the students participating in a worldwide online mathematics competition and examine these experiences from the gifted education perspective. Based on this aim, 597 third to eleventh-grade students who took part in this international mathematics contest held in 2018-2019 educational year from 28 different countries constituted the participants of the study. Students’ ideas regarding their contest-related experiences were evaluated and then these ideas were examined on whether the contest serves the purpose of students needing extra materials/studies in mathematics, like gifted ones. Findings reflected that 15.7% of the students’ views about such an international, digital math contest are unfavorable while 63.5% of them are favorable as well as 20.8% of them indicate their suggestions. Many of the students mentioned that they liked the challenge in the contest, thanked and found it as fun or awesome. It was seen that the contest mostly serves the students who request and desire challenge in their tasks. It was also concluded that the contest can attain the goals of mathematically gifted students searching for extra services in mathematics by providing them challenging problem-solving tasks or game-based interactive math activities in such a different, worldwide platform.
Highlights
In contemporary world, in order to make students discover and internalize the nature of actual math, educational research in mathematics led to the new trends that enable students explore and question mathematics while challenging and motivating them
It can be said in a general manner, when compared to negative remarks, most of the students shared their positive remarks about contests because the ones indicating favorable comments were considerably more than unfavorable ones
When we investigate favorable views category, it can be seen that students expressing their favorable views mostly mentioned about liking the contest (18.0%) while most of the other views concentrated on their satisfaction with the challenge of the questions (17.5%)
Summary
In order to make students discover and internalize the nature of actual math, educational research in mathematics led to the new trends that enable students explore and question mathematics while challenging and motivating them. In this sense, some terms like challenge, competitions, edutainment, mathematical games are more involved in both research area and our lives (Gleason, 2008). To illustrate, Thrasher (2008) unveils that competitions provide challenge both to teachers and students and increase students’ interest and curiosity about mathematics He highlights that both participation and training process of competitions enable students to make sense of the non-routine mathematical problems which they may not face in their regular classrooms
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