Contained below is a descriptive container of the projects affiliated with Eduvis. Be aware that depending on which project you wish to query, some of them may be of reference to past activities; some will be currently available and others are yet to be released to the public.
The ‘Pat Roberts Accessible Calculator Benefit’ (PRACB)
The main aims of the PRACB fund are to:
- Offer funds for accessible calculators to education services for students with VI, in all states and territories of Australia in 2020.
- Produce training material to support VI students who choose to independently operate CAS or graphical calculators.
The PRACB and its aims have been approved at an interstate level in New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland.
Entertainment Book fundraiser
Eduvis Entertainment Book Fundraising is distributed towards $500 bursaries to purchase expensive accessible calculators for Yr.10-12 Australian maths students with blindness and vision impairment. It is anticipated that having an accessible calculator will improve student independence and improve the retention rate of students with BVI studying senior maths in secondary schools.
Link: https://www.entertainment.com.au/orderbooks/965j898
We are most grateful for donations to the benefit from Ronda & Barrie Moeller, Nicole Monroe & Sonja Braniff.
Funds for accessible calculators offered to education services for students with VI, in all states and territories of Australia in 2020
Funds were offered in all states and offers were taken up in NSW, QLD and SA, a project headed up by Charlie Roberts, a mathematics and physical education teacher and teacher for vision impaired students.
Research and development of accessible CAS calculator software that can be independently operated by VI students
This project is still in the works.
Training material for VI students who choose to independently operate CAS or graphical calculators
The bulk of this material has been produced by Nathaniel Schmidt and Charlie Roberts.
Our aim is to produce a video presentation, which will reveal the results of a comparative and contrastive software-analytical assessment of viable and useful CAS software solutions for students. the aim will be to find and demonstrate solutions that:
- Are preferably cross-platform, particularly if they can be used on computer operating systems such as Mac, windows and Linux;
- Are at least relatively easy to learn, even without much of a computing, let alone programming, background;
- Possess a graphical user interface (GUI), since text-based consoles and coded input source files and / or scripts can be daunting for people who are not used to them. If an adequate GUI cannot be found then web applications and CLIs will be evaluated; but probably mostly CLIs in this case, as some curriculum authorities are apparently reluctant to permit the use of online calculators.
Specifications for students studying in Victoria, Australia, according to the state curriculum
Currently, VCAA approves for use in formal examinations the use of Maplesoft’s Maple (Student ed.), the popular Wolfram Mathematica and Mathworks’ classic Matlab, commonly used by engineers throughout the world. But these solutions have only been partially tested from a VI standpoint and are only general specifications for individually approved schools, not individual persons. So in other words, it is important to note that there are not necessarily any specific accessibility considerations in mind for a VI student under these circumstances on the part of the VCAA.
It is our intention to examine all of these solutions, with the additional inclusion of the solution that I used for both Methods and Further Maths, namely the free, open-source and cross-platform Maxima CAS software calculator, which has a very arguably similar syntactical and functional feel to Maple and takes up far less hard disk space compared to the other commercialised solutions.
The videos and their associated transcripts have been partially completed thus far and are contained below.
Videos
Transcript
Download as a Microsoft Word document, an HTML document (locally-viewable webpage), PDF document, or as Unicode plain text.