Contributions to EduVis

What is Eduvis?

Eduvis (standing for “Education Vision”) is a not-for-profit organisation, founded in mid 2019 by Charlie Roberts, an Australian Mathematics and Physical Education teacher and Teacher for Students with Vision Impairment. Eduvis aims to provide informative numeracy and physical-educational resources for any blind or vision impaired (VI) students – but specifically for those in Australian (Victorian) secondary education – who may be considering the prospect of taking up studies in mathematics at an intermediate or advanced level, or physical education. this is especially relevant for mathematics if the secondary student wishes to perform their studies completely independently of any external human operators of mathematical equipment such as calculators, whether at home or at school. In Victoria this culminates, beyond the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA)’s basic Further Mathematics subject, in the options of either CAS Maths (Mathematical Methods) and / or Specialist Mathematics in years eleven and twelve. It is also hoped that these resources may continue to be helpful for a student if any further education in mathematics is taken up at a tertiary level.

Why the Need for Such an Organisation?

Different states in Australia have fairly varied standards when it comes to government-approved solutions for mathematical calculation by electronic and computational means. Some states recommend (if not require) the use of graphing calculators, while another approves scientific calculators only. Victoria is unique in that it specifically mandates the use of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) calculators for computing solutions to problems. A CAS calculator is a hardware or software entity, sometimes slightly more specialised than a general scientific calculator, that utilises internally designed and coded algorithms, which attempt to replicate, to the best degree possible, the human activity that a mathematician would need to use in order to solve a mathematical problem. they can be used to work out a whole range of problems: they can solve, simplify or expand quadratics i.e. linear-algebraic expressions and equations; they can work with matrices; they can do calculus; and a huge range of other things.

In the past, compromises have sometimes been made by using accessible graphing calculators, as some programmable graphing calculators already have CAS capabilities built into their software. However, practically all of the hardware solutions are very expensive, although things have been made a little easier with online calculators in the form of accessible web applications such as graphing and scientific solutions from websites such as Desmos. But these ‘solutions’ have always been a purely pragmatic, concessional compromise and do not match the state of Victoria’s educational-technological specifications for higher-level secondary mathematics. The student is still largely responsible for doing the extra hard work of doing one’s own homework in order to solve their work and disability-related issues, as the VCAA-approved textbooks do not provide graphing calculator solutions to problems used in the classroom.

The most currently viable solution appears to be the use of software CAS solutions. There are many of these available and VCAA has reportedly approved quite a number of different software solutions as alternatives to hardware CAS calculators. Consequently, it can be very difficult for a blind or vision impaired student to know where to start. It is therefore deemed necessary to provide readily accessible information on what solutions are available, the pros and cons of each, what modes of access they can be used in and precisely how to actually operate specific software features in order to address mathematical problems found in workbook exercises.

My Personal Contribution

My contribution to this organisation (coming soon) is funded by the ‘Pat Roberts Accessible Calculator Benefit’. The PRACB and its aims have been approved at an interstate level in New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland and by Dr. Kyle Keane of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a lecturer of mathematical and computational methods, lecturer of principles and practice of assistive technology, as well as a research programmer of educational software and special projects and an R&D Fellow at Wolfram Research Inc.

The main aims of the PRACB are to:

• Offer funds for accessible calculators to education services for students with VI, in all states and territories of Australia in 2020.
• Help fund research and development of accessible CAS calculator software that can be independently operated by VI students, a project lead by Dr. Keane.
• Produce training material to support VI students who choose to independently operate CAS or graphical calculators.

For now, my contribution is limited to the latter. Our aim is to produce a video presentation, which will reveal the results of a comparative and contrastive software-analytical assessment of viable and useful CAS software solutions for students. the aim will be to find and demonstrate solutions that:

• Are preferably cross-platform, particularly if they can be used on computer operating systems such as Mac, windows and Linux;
• Are at least relatively easy to learn, even without much of a computing, let alone programming, background;
• Possess a graphical user interface (GUI), since text-based consoles and coded input source files and / or scripts can be daunting for people who are not used to them. If an adequate GUI cannot be found then web applications and CLIs will be evaluated; but probably mostly CLIs in this case, as VCAA is apparently reluctant to permit the use of online calculators.

Currently, as alluded to above, the VCAA approves for use in formal examinations the use of Maplesoft’s Maple (Student ed.), the popular Wolfram Mathematica and Mathworks’ classic Matlab, commonly used by engineers throughout the world. But these solutions have only been partially tested from a VI standpoint and are only general specs for individually approved schools, not individual persons. So in other words, it is important to note that there are not necessarily any specific accessibility considerations in mind for a VI student under these circumstances on the part of the VCAA.

It is my intention to examine all of these solutions, with the additional inclusion of the solution that I used for both Methods and Further Maths, namely the free, open-source and cross-platform Maxima CAS software calculator, which has a very arguably similar syntactical and functional feel to Maple and takes up far less hard disk space compared to the other commercialised solutions.

The videos and their associated transcripts have been partially completed thus far and are contained below.

Videos:

Transcript:

Download as a Microsoft Word document, an HTML document (locally-viewable webpage), PDF document, or as Unicode plain text.

Existing External Research

Below you can find resources containing research that has already been conducted directly concerning comparisons of ICT solutions and the impact upon VI students studying mathematics.