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While still teaching at SUNY at Buffalo, in the late 1960s, I became familiar with the
new program, proposed and run by Jim Kaput, at the University of Massachusetts,
Dartmouth, called START. The purpose of the program was to help students to overcome,
in their freshman year, deficiencies in Algebra and to help them to proceed
onwards to a math, science, or engineering degree. Naturally, the students presenting
deficiencies come from different cultural environments, revealing the broad social
concern of the program. These were the pioneer ideas that led to the SimCalc
Project, launched in 1994 with the main objective of helping students to advance in
Algebra and Calculus. In 2007 I was invited to join the Advisory Board of the James
J. Kaput Center for Research and Innovation in Mathematics Education at the University
of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Later, we had the opportunity of receiving the
visits of researchers from the Kaput Center at UNIBAN/Universidade Bandeirantes
de São Paulo. There the visitors made it very clear that the proposals of SimCalc are
of much benefit for practically every country.
The core of the SimCalc Project is the idea of Jim Kaput to let Mathematics
Education spring out of change and variation, which he conceptualized as a major
strand of mathematical development leading through Algebra and beyond Calculus.
The seminal idea is to enliven and enrich mathematics in every grade level and simultaneously
to give students access to critically important mathematical concepts
much earlier. The development of specific technologies to achieve this goal is key
for the success of this ambitious educational proposal. In this development, research
of SimCalc must review, critically, the most relevant current educational practices,
which largely reflect our past and, at the same time, venture into the future, proposing
new directions for education. The same care of critically regarding the past is
present in their views of the future. Thus, they avoid being trapped by the marvels
suggested by the new, amazing, technologies. |
