This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Mathsoft will create a new software program and assessment tool that will manipulate images obtained from the World-Wide Web in support of the grade 8-12 curriculum. Through construction of images containing special effects, students engage in project-oriented, collaborative learning, publication of their work on the Internet, and integration of mathematics with writing, art, and computer science. The project builds on technology developed at the University of Washington under two distinct NSF-supported research investigations: one on the use of image processing in K-12 mathematics education and the other on assessment of student learning from their textual constructions in the subjects of probability and statistics. Concomitantly developing and testing an assessment framework that will allow teachers to easily determine what students are getting of their web-based mathematical experiences should serve to facilitate teacher adoption of the approach. The concept of developing a web-oriented mathematical image editor that allows students to manipulate graphical images exploits the mathematical nature of multimedia objects found on the World-Wide Web. It has potential for interdisciplinary applications across the curriculum to support art, writing, and science teaching. It also could serve to teach the foundations of scientific visualization and to give students experience with real world visual applications such as data encryption, image morphing, and, mathematical descriptions of visual objects.
