Using JSXGraph in a Collaborative Learning Environment
Boris Goldowsky, Leslie Bondaryk, Kirk Swenson
Concord Consortium, Concord, MA, USA
Abstract
Concord Consortium’s Collaborative Learning User Environment (CLUE) is a web-based application that allows students to share mathematics work in small groups or across the class either in person or asynchronously. CLUE documents can contain multiple types of “tiles”, including text, images, tables, and graphs. JSXGraph underlies the implementation of CLUE’s Coordinate Grid tile. This environment is used in research programs to study student acquisition of math concepts. Some unique features of the implementation include
- Real-time collaboration: changes made by one user in a JSXGraph diagram can be watched in real time by other students and teachers.
- History tracking: we record not just the current state of the diagram, but all previous states. Students and teachers can replay changes, and the student’s process as well as their final product is visible to their teacher and our researchers.
- Data linking: data can be shared between tiles, so the correspondence between x,y values in a table and geometry objects constructed from these points can be explored.
We will show some examples of how this functionality is used in the classroom, and talk about the benefits that JSXGraph brought to the project, as well as a few challenges that we encountered during the integration.