This project will develop a series of mathematics software programs for middle school students. These programs are to develop skills in mathematics problem solving. It has a specific target: at-risk students in the middle school. The goal is to develop a discovery based approach to enable students to explore the types of information necessary to discover key procedures. Two types of software will be developed. the first type is a toolkit which enable students to construct experiments on the relationships among different ways of expressing numbers. the second type is word problem processors, which allow students to generate varieties of word problems and speculate about similarities of the conditions under which the computer used a particular approach to solving a given problem. In addition, lesson plans will be developed and published. These lessons are to guide the teachers in the use of the software. The lessons will be geared to existing software as well as the software being developed on the project. The result will be a complete course of lessons.
