Taking the MICK: What is a Mathematics Interactive Classroom Kit?

Abstract

“Wouldn’t it be great if lecture theatres had a bank of screens at the rear,allowing a lecturer to see what students were thinking?”, asked Prof Phil Raceduring one of his recent workshops on the teaching of large groups. Besidesthe fact that the images displayed would probably include beaches, beer andbodies, rather than mathematical symbols, there are at least three furtherproblems:• students don’t like having electrodes implanted in their brains• the lecturer would be overloaded by all the information on multiplescreens• interaction between lecturer and students is not promoted by the screensAn interactive classroom addresses these problems and many others! Firstly,a less painful way of probing the minds of students during a live class is to askthem questions, but the problem remains as to how you deal with the answers.They could be written down, discussed in groups, given by selected volunteersand so on. A Mathematics Interactive Classroom Kit(MICK), used with thesoftware product Discourse, helps gather responses to questions from allstudents, presents them to a lecturer in a more manageable form, enables groupfeedback to be given and allows all students to ask questions anonymously ifthey do not understand. The opportunity for students to give anonymousanswers and ask anonymous questions encourages the weakest students toparticipate without fear of embarrassment. Objective questions can bemarked automatically with or without immediate feedback to students. Thelecturer can see how well the class is progressing while questions are still beinganswered.Expressing all this another way: the bank of screens is designed to giveimmediate feedback to the lecturer. Computer assisted assessment is a morepractical use of technology for giving immediate feedback to students, butwhat if you want immediate feedback for both lecturer and students? Whattools are available to help a lecturer make live classes more interactive? Aconventional Powerpoint presentation or an interactive whiteboard do notfulfil that role. An interactive classroom does.