WP1: Project Management

WP1 will ensure an effective and efficient budget and time management, as well as the quality and content assurance, by implementing the most appropriate tools and means that will guarantee the monitoring of all activities, administrative management, coordination, budget implementation and communication between all the partners.

WP2: Inclusive Elements – App

The main objective of this work package is to significantly raise the level of inclusion of the MathCityMap (MCM) app by simultaneously reducing the threshold to participate in the MCM math trail experience. Since the MCM system was developed in two preceding Erasmus+ projects (MoMaTrE and MaSCE³), the app is already available in various European and international languages.

The content, however, is still only available in the language the teacher used creating it – there is no universal ad-hoc translation functionality for MCM content. Such a functionality could open the math trail experience to more students, including those coming from abroad knowing neither English nor the local language but seeking to connect to a new educational system. Implementing this translation feature using cutting-edge translation technology is the core part of this work package. To further address students with visual impairments, the MCM app is to be enriched by a read-aloud function and a zoom function making it easier to use. Moreover, the app makes use of gamification features to raise the motivation of the students while working on the math trail. Building on first positive effects by Gurjanow et al. (2019), gamification is planned to be extended by additional rewarding aspects, such as badges and
awards for math trail completions.

Eventually, students should be more involved in the quality-assuring validation loop of MCM content and, thus, be given the opportunity to report any problems or misconceptions with a task to the teacher directly via the app. New answer formats utilizing Drag&Drop or such requiring selections from a predefined set of answers present an intuitive way to answer a task which is especially easy to start with. For some of the already existing answer formats, automated adaptive feedback is planned (e.g., for fractions “Your answer is correct but not yet completely reduced.”) to enrich the learning experience for these tasks.

WP3: Inclusive Elements- Web Portal

This work package comprises three core objectives – (i) students as content creators, (ii) inclusivity, and (iii) task inspiration – which will be achieved via improvements to existing and the development of new features for the MathCityMap (MCM) system.

(i) Until now, MCM is clearly divided into the students’ (the app) and the teachers’ side (the web portal). By implementing student accounts, we aim to open the teachers’ side to the students allowing them to create and develop their own tasks and math trails. Doing so, students can train competences both in dealing with digital media and in various mathematical fields. This, in turn, enriches the learning environment for all learners, as a variety of perspectives on different mathematical objects will be created and made available for everyone in the MCM community. The teachers will take the role of a coach and we will support them with new analytic features for the MCM Digital Classroom.

(ii) Opening the web portal for constructivist student activity, which is particularly beneficial in an inclusive setting (Reale et al., 2022), also calls for inclusive elements, lowering the threshold for participation in the creation of student tasks. We plan to achieve this by improving the intuitiveness of the web portal, e.g., by offering onboarding dialogs and help icons. Moreover, tasks can be marked to consist of easy-language with respect to students with learning difficulties or who are still learning the language.

(iii) The students’ every-day environment is formed by mathematic concepts. Yet, discovering this variety can still be a challenge. Thus, we want to provide students a source of inspiration for outdoor mathematical tasks based on the MCM activity of over 20.000 teachers. By analyzing the tasks created so far, a categorization and subsequently implemented content search will grant

WP4: Dissemination

WP4 focuses on activities related to the preparation and dissemination of MATRIX project results. Accordingly, the main goal is to make the developments known to our target groups, but also beyond, and to attract as many students and teachers as possible to the project. On the one hand, our goal is to attract as many teachers as possible who will use inclusive elements and/or the student accounts in mathematics classes. Through the teachers, our main target group, the students, will ultimately be reached. Within the framework of the national teacher training courses, our goal is therefore to train as many teachers as possible in the safe use of the new developments. Furthermore, we would like to focus on internationalization and international exchange in this WP, on the one hand on the school level by expanding the partner school community and on the other hand on the level of the students, who will get the opportunity to establish international contacts and to get to know the advantages of international working in the final exchange.

These are the main objectives of the activities related to WP4:

• To verify the needs and purposes of the activities
• To reach the target groups and stakeholders
• To identify, develop and sustain effective channels of dissemination and communication, which will facilitate the exchange of information among project partners and all key stakeholders and enhance the coordination mechanism, ensuring that the overall communication and visibility goals are reached successfully.

The WP is closely connected to the other WPs of the project since the technical and material-based developments are presented in the activities of WP4. With a special focus on the general objectives of the project, WP4 contributes significantly to the idea of an international growing community of teachers and students using math trails in an inclusive way of teaching and learning.

WP5: Material Development

WP5 can be seen as the didactic enrichment of the technical WP2 and 3 as well as the preparation of activities related to WP4. Through providing different kinds of materials for both teachers and students, WP5 enables the target groups to use the new teaching and learning approaches meaningful in mathematics education.

Our main objectives for this WP are:

• Providing a low-barrier introduction to the use of MathCityMap from a student’s perspective (especially in terms of the student accounts from WP3) and educate as many students as possible in their own task creation.
• Enabling teachers to successfully use the inclusive elements in MathCityMap (cf. WP2) and to provide the option for students to create their own tasks as a teaching unit (cf. WP3) through material concerning professional development (cf. WP4).
• Providing best-practice examples for basic arithmetics and easy language (cf. WP2). Both concepts have been further developed in recent years to enable people with learning difficulties and reading comprehension skills to access mathematics tasks and texts (Maaß, 2015). It is thus an important tool for inclusive teaching. However, both are not intuitively usable, especially for people who are used to dealing with complex sentence structures and conceptual understanding, strategic competence, productive dispositions, adaptive reasoning and procedural fluency. For example, teachers constantly address texts to groups of people such as students with a migration background, learning difficulties or mental disabilities, especially in the form of tasks (Baumert, 2016). Within WP5, we want to remedy the situation and provide teachers with rules in the form of an online tutorial based on scientific findings, with the help of which they can formulate tasks in easy language and design example tasks directly addressing students’ number sense, understanding of the place value and position-based number system.