This project will develop software to support the high-volume mathematical communication of MathForum, an internet-based learning community headquartered at Drexel University. MathForum involves thousands of middle school and high school students from across the nation and hundreds of teachers and volunteers. All of them spend much of their time communicating mathematical content without any support from specialized tools: the learning curve of even the best existing tools being too steep for widespread adoption. This situation not only impacts the appearance and clarity of the communication; it also isolates the community from state-of-the-art computer algebra tools and makes it unsuitable for the next generation of communication devices. Moreover, it prevents sophisticated reuse of archived materials because there is no structure that can be used as a basis for search other than character strings.
This project will remedy the situation by developing tools that support the creation of mathematical content, improve the retrieval of existing material, provide a link to computer algebra systems, and prepare MathForum for the introduction of new communication technologies. The development of the tools will be coordinated with MathForum, and continuous user assessment will be done to ensure that the tools produced will be useful to the target audience.
These communication goals are achieved by making our human-computer interface exploit domain-specific information and context, and by allowing it to draw on data derived from MathForum's extensive archive of past interactions. By linking tutorial information with the capabilities of a computer algebra system the system will allow the inclusion of example generators, interactive exploration for studying multiple instances of a problem, and graphics and equation manipulation for illustration and enhanced understanding. Finally, ways to make smart phones, wireless PDAs and other convergence devices useful for mathematics communication are investigated. The extent to which various devices can support mathematical communication will be determined and ways of optimizing this support will be sought.
The MathForum is a highly visible and successful web-based service for the mathematics education community, receiving approximately 1.7 million visits per month. A key portion of this service is "Ask Dr. Math", which receives and answers thousands of questions a month via email. The answers are provided by a volunteer team of "math doctors", and become part of an archive of over 450,000 Q&A items. The nature of mathematical communication within the context of "Ask Dr. Math" will be investigated tools built in support of such communication.
The mathematical communication tools developed for the MathForum community will have more general applicability to the large community of technical educators, and to anyone engaged in learning or training activities involving mathematics. Another important class of users would be the distributed communities of researchers using the Internet to support their collaboration. We regard software supporting such functionality as being an important component of the national cyberinfrastructure for scientific/engineering research and education.
