Circles - a program for learning mathematics.
Circles is a program written for Mr Bakr Al Bazi, Mathematics teacher at The Grammar School at Leeds. Bakr approached me asking for a simple program to aid students' understanding of the properties of circles. After several conversations, and a number of iterations, the result is the program on this page. Students can create a new circle by selecting the dimensions on a piece of virtual graph paper and the program then generates the vital statistics for that circle (radius, diameter, area) - but it does not indicate which is which! It is up to the students to work out the relationships between the numbers, and to find the value of pi themselves.
Follow this link to download Circles 1.4.0.1 for Windows computers.
"3 circles, 6 values for each circle. Students started to investigate these values with no input from me.
"Independent Learning was taking place.
Ratio, radius, diameter.... every notion that involved circles was
discussed and then pi came in."
"It was wonderful! I realised that adopting
the use of new technology to support traditional instructions has not
only it made me change the way I teach, but also the way students
learn."
"We, teachers use ICT in our day to day duties: word processing, spreadsheet, graphical tools...
New technologies are the extra 'ingredient' to enhance the learning experience of the student. On this
basis I am trying to use these technologies more often and to integrate
them more into my lessons. I use ICT as I believe I
can make a difference to pupils’ learning. I understand it is by
increasing the practise or the use of the technology in classroom that
both teachers and students will entirely benefits from what technology
has to offer. However, some issues that could be
encountered make the full use a bit difficult. I realised that
colleagues in ICT could help in overcoming this difficulties."
"It is important
that we teachers identify and monitor which software or technology
should be used by pupils to ensure that it enhance their learning
experience. So, bearing in mind that the use of technology
might not be as beneficial as for the maths department, I believe that
as teachers we should collaborate more with ICT staff and make the
teaching and learning tailored to the students/our needs."
 |
| Here the program is seen running on my tablet computer. I have selected two points, one at the center of the circle, and another one on the circumference. The program has generated the first line of parameters for this circle (radius, radius squared, and area) and the second line (radius, diameter and circumference). |