Author: Panagiota Argyri

Are you STEM teacher and look for lesson plans or materials to share with your students, while schools are closed? Do you think that learning mathematics are strongly connected with real world? Are you worried to give explanations to you students for the global pandemic, called “Covid-19”?

Our classroom is away from us but we can bring it close to us by exploiting the new technologies’ affordances on distance learning and through up-to-date and important issues create incentives for learning and exploitation of knowledge we teach in the national curriculum, even with our schools closed.

I, Ms Panagiota Argyri, by exploiting the digital tools on distance teaching and learning of the European project Golab, created the inquiry learning space Mathematical Aproach Covid-19 Into Global Community.

A distance learning lesson has already been realised with B3 class of Evangeliki Model School of Smyrna, whose students’ interest and response gives motivation for the realisation of the same lesson to other classes as well, at 01 April using Scientix Online Meeting Room . Thanks a lot Scientix for this unique opportunity offered to European Educational STEM community.

The objective of this lesson is to highlight the mathematical knowledge so that students can understand how a virus/contagious disease spread in a population.

Through this lesson, it is justified with the use of maths how important prevention measures are. Mathematics confirms the measures of personal and social responsibility that we must all take.

Math modelling (algebraic and graphic), in combination with the statistical processing of the global data, constitutes an important mathematical tool of the global community for the taking of measures against the spread of the virus.

This lesson answers the questions:

-How does a virus spread in a population?

-Which factors and in what way do they affect the speed and the width of the spread?

The creation of math models is a process with various limitations and it cannot replace the natural evolution of the diseases, the epidemics or the evolution of a population. This lesson is an opportunity to understand real situations with the help of math tools (functions).

The students could work online in the Inquiry Learning Space (ILS), discuss and share our good practices in the etwinning group ‘Learning and Teaching with Covid-19’. All European community signs emergency signals for our health, but we, as educational community we could encourage the motivations in learning with curriculum, as a way to keep interesting and stay at home.

I also has created for Greek Education Community the e-class, where will be uploaded all the teaching scenarios about the pandemic Covid-19 connected to the subjects of the national curriculum, as well as the students’ projects on them.