More partner schools!

We are very happy to welcome again two schools in our partner school program. This time it is the “Zakladna skola Janka Matusku” from the city of Dolný Kubín in the north of Slovakia and the “Pombal Secondary School” from Pombal, a city in Portugal.

Both schools successfully completed the necessary application process. In Pombal, teachers Diana Santos, Ana Medeiros, Teresa Oliveira and Margarida Fonseca worked together on a total of three trails, each focusing on a different grade level and different content.

“The students were very enthusiastic and participative in this, and there was great feedback from the students that the knowledge they had acquired during the school year was applied in a different and more fun way” Diana Santos told us.

In Dolný Kubín, two diverse math trails were created by math teacher Klaudia Kovalcíková and tested with her students. She reports about the experience in the application process as follows:

“I have been working in education for about 3 years. In that short time, I have found that the most popular question my students ask me is, “What are we going to use this school stuff for? Where will I use this knowledge in my life?” So, instead of a humble answer, the idea of creating a math trail was born to show students how to apply math directly in the real world, in our city or in their environment. During the school year we made several trails through the town of Dolný Kubín. Dozens of photos of various objects, buildings and parks were taken and the students learned how to work in the Mathcitymap portal. They suddenly discovered that mathematics is not only a school subject, but it is in almost every object. It must be not only about its visual form, but also about its content value (for what reason was this object created, what does it symbolize, when was it built, …). We pass many memorial / information boards every day, but only now have we discovered that they not only reveal many mathematical possibilities for their use, but that thanks to them we also learn about the history of our city and its people.”

One of the students there also shared his experience with MathCityMap for us:

“Math Trails have given me more than just attending a regular class. What was the goal? We created tasks that we implemented outdoors, in a digital classroom. We learned about the town of Dolný Kubín and its history from a mathematical perspective. I would also like to thank our teacher Mrs. Kovalčíková for this opportunity.

I often go to Námestovo, but only now I found out that there is a statue of Ján Vojtaššák in front of the church (when we measured it with the other students). Until now, a meter for me was three thirty-centimeter yardsticks and a few centimeters more. Today, one meter is equal to two-thirds of a park bench, for example. I can calculate the volume of the bench, I know how many poles we need for it. I also figured out what the circumference of the fountain in our city is. Math was no longer just numbers, pencil, paper, ruler, interactive whiteboard…. We were outside touching our math problems, we measured them with a string, we looked for solutions together, etc. It was great. On the way home from school, I look around and think about what object will be our math problem next time. I’m looking forward to it.”

The package with the measuring tools and the official partner school plaque is already on its way to the schools and, as always, we are very much looking forward to receiving further applications from all over the world.

All further information about the partner school program and the prerequisites for the application can be found in the article about the first MCM partner school as well as on the homepage of our project MaSCE³.