Page type: project

Mathematics Experiences Through Image Processing (METIP);;Mathematics Experiences Through Image Processing (METIP);Project Director: Steven Tanimoto;Department of Computer Science & Engineering,;University of Washington, Box 352350,;Seattle, WA 98195-2350 USA;A major educational problem in United States and some other countries;is that;students in grades K-12 lose interest in mathematics and science;as they progress through school.;Students often complain that;mathematics is difficult and that they don't see much use for it past simple;arithmetic. In response to these concerns, the National Council of;Teachers of Mathematics has identified a number of features that the grades;5-8 curriculum should include in order to help motivate students to stay;interested:; favor conceptual learning over rote operations;; emphasize practical uses of mathematics;; encourage discussions and group learning; and; encourage exploratory, open-ended learning.;The goal of the METIP project is to use;digital image processing to help meet these;objectives. In particular, we have developed a series of applications;designed to allow students to manipulate digitized images of their choice.;These materials are intended to be used in enrichment activities; rather than part of a;standard classroom curriculum. Teachers can play various roles with;these activities; for example, they can catalyze student learning by;leading discussions of the;concepts students have explored on the computer.;The METIP Project currently has a number of programs that allow students to;explore mathematics with image processing:; The Pixel Calculator (Click here to order your; free copy today!); The Image Warper (Click here to order your free copy today!); The Transform Programmer (Click here to order your free copy today!);These applications were developed primarily for 386/486/Pentium based PC's;running Microsoft Windows. One application, the Pixel Calculator, is also;available for the Apple Macintosh.;Here is a list of all the people working on the;METIP project.;A closely related project we are involved with is the study of;multiplayer educational activities.;The METIP project is working to;integrate the use of the WWW into its activities.;Some ideas are described in Prospects for;the Direct Use of Distributed Image Databases in Educational Image Processing.;Currently the project is collecting the experiences of users with its;XFORM image transformation software. If you have done something;fun or useful with the software please let us know.;We are putting the current version of its documentation online.;Here is a link to it.. A set of little demonstrations for XFORM has been;put together by graduate students who took a;seminar during the winter of 1996..;The XFORM programming environment, integrated with;a subset of Common Lisp, offers the technical essentials for a new;approach to learning and teaching computer programming --- the fundamental;attraction of using this approach is that students learn to program the;computer in the pursuit of creating neat visual effects with digital;images portraying people or things of interest to them.;If you have successfully installed the software and would like to discuss;teaching programming this way, please contact us.;Links to some related projects are listed here.;METIP is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under;grant number MDR-9155709.;; bricker@cs.washington.edu or tanimoto@cs.washington.edu; Last modified: Tuesday, 6 February 1996.;