An application to EPSRC (PPA11) for support for Motivate mathematics video-conferences for schools

Motivate视频会议项目将数学家和科学家与整个英国的小学和中学联系起来，英国学校与南非，美国，巴基斯坦，香港，新加坡和印度之间也有国际联系。大多数演讲者是研究数学家和科学家，无论是既定的或博士生，而其他人在工业界工作，或目前的课堂教师谁拥有特殊的专业知识，以提供。该计划的目的是提高参与学校学生的一般教育愿望，拓展他们的智力，发展他们的沟通技巧和信心，并向他们展示数学可能在他们的未来发挥作用。激励会议是高度互动的。最常见的形式是两次视频会议研讨会，间隔约一个月。在第一次视频会议中，专家演讲者向学生讲述了为什么他们选择学习数学，物理学或工程学并将研究作为职业，然后带领学生探索迄今为止所涵盖的主题/示例，其中包括体育数学，疾病动力学的数学建模，雪崩，迷宫和迷宫的流体动力学，法医数学和全球债务。随后，为学生们制定了后续项目工作，以便在视频会议之间进行工作，包括对该主题的合作调查工作。学生有机会从事丰富和扩展正常数学/科学课程的项目，并使他们能够在激励他们的团队和展示他们的研究方面发展可转移的技能。然后，学生们向演讲者和其他相关学校展示他们的发现，并在几周后的第二次视频会议上回答同行和专家的问题。六年级会议和一些会议为年轻的年龄组包括一天的大师班与突破小组研讨会。还有一些长期项目，持续一个学年，让学校有机会在一个扩展项目上相互合作。每次会议都有大约4-6所不同的学校参加，该计划对任何学校都开放申请。这些会议非常受欢迎，方案总是超额认购/大多数主要方案会议的等待名单上有尽可能多的学校再次实际参与-反馈是非常积极的。此外，所有学校都可以在Motivate网站（www.motivate.maths.org）上免费获得项目任务和辅助说明，因此该方案的覆盖面更广，许多学校利用这些资源支持暑期学校或数学日活动。在过去的一个学年（2006/7），动机网站收到50万网站访问，或675万点击。动机项目协调员，博士珍妮盖奇，是一位经验丰富的教师，在数学教育博士学位。激励项目与教师密切合作，教师在指导学生和评估方案方面发挥着重要作用。该项目为教师提供持续专业发展的机会，以建立和扩展他们的学科知识，并使他们能够探索和试验视频会议的潜力所建议的新教学策略。目前的建议是支持，继续和发展这个非常成功的现有项目，建立在其在英国和海外现有学术研究人员和学校学生之间建立联系的杰出记录之上，同时提供了一个久经考验的界面，以无障碍的格式和适当的水平为目标受众介绍EPSRC相关的研究。

The Motivate video-conferencing project links mathematicians and scientists to primary and secondary schools across the whole of the UK, with international links between UK schools and South Africa, the USA, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore and India too. Most speakers are research mathematicians and scientists, either established or PhD students, while others work in industry, or are current classroom teachers who have particular expertise to offer.The aim of the programme is to raise the general educational aspirations of the participating school students, to stretch them intellectually, to develop their communication skills and confidence and to show them that mathematics might have a part to play in their futures.Motivate conferences are highly interactive. The most common format is a pair of video-conferenced seminars about a month apart. In the first video-conference, the expert speaker talks to the students about why they chose to study maths, physics or engineering and pursue research as a career, and then leads the students in exploring the topic / examples covered so far include, among many others, the maths of sport, the mathematical modelling of disease dynamics, the fluid dynamics of avalanches, labyrinths and mazes, forensic mathematics and global debt. Follow-up project work is then set for the pupils to work on between the video-conferences, involving collaborative investigative work into the topic. The students have the opportunity to work on projects that enrich and extend the normal mathematics / science curricula and allow them to develop transferable skills in motivating their groups and presenting their research. The students then present their findings to the speaker and the other schools involved, and answer questions from their peers and the expert in the second video-conference a few weeks later. Sixth-form conferences and some conferences for younger age groups consist of a single day master class with break-out group workshops. There are also long projects, which last over a school year to give schools the opportunity to work with each other on an extended project.Each conference involves a group of around 4-6 different schools, and the programme is open to application from any school. The conferences are enormously popular, with the programme always oversubscribed / most of the main programme conferences have waiting lists of as many schools again as can actually be involved - and feedback is extremely positive. In addition, the project tasks and supporting notes are freely available to all schools on the Motivate website (www.motivate.maths.org), and the programme therefore has an additional reach, with many schools using these resources to support summer schools or Maths Day activities. Over the past school year (2006/7) the Motivate website received 500,000 site visits, or 6.75 million hits.The Motivate Project coordinator, Dr Jenny Gage, is an experienced teacher, with a PhD in mathematics education. The Motivate project works closely with teachers, who have a significant part to play in directing their students and evaluating the programme. The project offers CPD opportunities in building and extending teachers' subject knowledge and enabling them to explore and experiment with new teaching strategies suggested by the potential of video-conferencing.The current proposal is to support, continue and develop this existing highly successful project, building on its outstanding track record in creating links between current academic researchers and school students throughout the UK and overseas, while providing a tried and tested interface for the presentation of EPSRC-related research in an accessible format and at an appropriate level for the target audience.