This will start negative but I hope that you will read on and find that this project has given, at least me, a lot of ideas on how to use communication with other students from a different country to enhance students understanding of math. I hope that my students also has discovered new ways to look at math and how to communicate it to others.

There has been a number of obstacles to overcome in this project, regarding math. Most of them can be traced back to the compact courses at Rudbeck, there’s a lot of content that has to be taught in a short time. This makes it hard to find time for students to work on something that might not be in their current course but can give them knowledge that will help them with their understanding of math.

Me and Matthias have found ways to work around these problems to a good degree. Both our courses progress in pretty much the same way but they don’t match time wise. We solved this problem by letting the students send problems to each other on material from my last course and Matthias current one. Since I couldn’t use these problems for grading in my current course I instead focused on the communication between the students more than the actual math itself. Later on we switched and let Matthias’ students work on the imaginary numbers which was in my last course.

The one problem that never got solved was that my students used of a variety of platsforms for communication, where some weren’t ideal for relaying those messages back to me. For my students it was more important to have an easy way to send messages instead of using e-mail or similar service where they could forward their communication to me.

In the end we agreed that math within this project would fare much better if it was in the form of a Gymnasiearbete at Rudbeck where the students have a course, therefore time, dedicated to this. This time my students had already decided what to work on within the Gymnasiearbete, so sadly the information about the possibility to work with Digital Bridges came too late. They were interested in Digital Bridges as a theme but had already come up with their own ideas.

Conclusion: I think this is a great way to encourage students to take a different approach to math. Most problems were easy to fix. As long as we learn from our mistakes I think this will evolve into something even better in the future.

/Mårten Bergström