We met Guy Gervais, math teacher at the Académie des Estacades (CS Chemin-du-Roy), lecturer at UQTR and president of the GRMS. He tells us about the value of integrating programming to work on students' problem-solving skills.
The record number of registrations for the annual congress of GRMS demonstrates the growing desire of mathematics teachers to come together in order to change their practices. The breakthrough of robotics and programming, new educational trends such as escape games (Breakout) as well as sharing and collaborations facilitated by social networks, in particular the Facebook group Math differently have all had an impact on this movement. Guy points out that with the reform, teachers have had to adapt to a new philosophy, more competency-based content and modern technologies. Today, most of them have mastered these novelties and want to go further.
Work on problem solving through programming
In this interview, Guy explains that the new wave of block-based programming software, like Scratch, helps develop problem-solving skills with a view to gamification and continuous improvement. Indeed, with programming, the student is led to want to understand why he does not arrive at the right solution, then to try again until he succeeds.
To conclude, Guy invites teachers to take advantage of the site code time which offers a turnkey solution to live programming in the classroom. We invite you to listen to the interview to hear from Guy about the advantages of integrating programming activities in mathematics.
"It cannot be that a teacher does not have an hour in his year to code" - Guy Gervais
