A new computational increase is allowing support for the main basic undergraduate subjects offered by the Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Scientific Computing (Imecc). It is a website which has just been created and which initially aims to cover the teaching of Analytical Geometry and Differential Calculus of one or more variables. It was developed with resources from the Support Fund for Education, to Research and Extension (Faepex) at Unicamp, in the Teaching line. “Every university student from any area of basic sciences and engineering, from any university in the world, studies these contents”, reports its creator, professor Marcelo Firer. "The site can also include users from other Portuguese-speaking countries."
According to Firer, from the Mathematics Department, there are currently around 1.500 Unicamp students enrolled each year in each of these subjects. But this extensive material is also being made available to professors and interested parties at any other university. The website was developed by a company contracted with funding from Faepex, and the content was selected, edited and produced by a group of postgraduate students from Unicamp.
“Our platform includes a kind of 'mine map', in which equivalences are drawn between the various bibliographic references in the literature. There is also a collection of exercises distributed by content, classified by type of difficulty and exercise. Some of them only have answers and some only have solutions. The student can try to solve them alone and even evaluate their own performance”, says the teacher.
He reveals that, on the website, video classes recorded by professors from Unicamp and other institutions in Brazil and abroad can be accessed. "There are a series of micro-lessons, lasting up to ten minutes, on specific mathematics topics. We offer a large collection of content that is generally found in a fragmented form on the internet and that has been brought together on the website in a more organized way. There are also tests and exams in these subjects.”
Firer remembers that there was intense work involved in typing, selecting and organizing the material. The selection work alone took two months. Another intensive work was revision.
The platform, he reports, had been ready since last year, but some features were missing. "The main difficulty is in showing mathematical content in a system that allows screen adjustment for use in tablets, at smartphone. For mathematical annotation, there are still some technical limitations", he says. Even so, even before announcing the release of the site, news about the site has already gone viral. More than 135 thousand pages of content have been accessed since last year. The main hits on end of 2017 they left from Campinas, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Maputo-Mozambique, Curitiba, among other places.
Model
The new tool could be of great interest to teachers, highlights Firer. "They do a basic registration, enter with a login and prepare their tests using part of the proposed exercises. You can take your exam and make a 'pdf' of your test. And you can add Latex exercises (widely used in the production of mathematical and scientific texts)", describe. “The objective of the website is to provide more tools for consultation. It’s about offering a place where there is qualified content to support the courses.”
In Firer's opinion, the difficulties in relation to mathematics are greater for students who enter with significant gaps in their previous training and for those who have the experience of, for the first time, living alone and having to organize their studies. “Everything they study here, especially in the Imecc subjects, is significantly more complex than any content they saw in high school. So having support for studies can contribute a lot to these students’ knowledge”, he guarantees.
The only functionality that requires user registration is the preparation of tests. "But this is a quick process, carried out with just a few clicks. It only requires choosing the exercises and also offers the possibility of adding your own content to this material", he comments.
Firer's expectation is that people will use the site, possibly justifying its expansion, both in terms of including some other high-demand disciplines and adding additional features that were not included on the site due to resource limitations.
