Pas a Pas is an interactive educational tool for schools that enables children to learn and experiment with different sets of elements using animation. It aims to use the physicality and the animated outcome of stop motion animation to bridge the gap between abstract concepts from maths, physics or arts (usually represented by graphs, equations or words) and reality.

The system consist of three aspects: a platform to record and display animations, sets of elements for animating and a community to share the content generated.

The platform has a display, a camera and an interface with three main modes:

- Assistant: the display shows a guide for the children to place the elements at the right position in each frame. This way it introduces the students to the set of elements and enables them to explore concepts that are being taught in the conventional curriculum. It also intends to give a progressive learning of stop motion techniques in order to create better and more realistic animations.
- Director: children can create their own animated movies using the pieces provided or other objects.
- Collection: children can browse through movies that have been recorded on the same platform, or on remote platforms located in other schools.

Different sets of elements are designed to teach specific content for a certain age group, such as Geometry for 4 to 6 year olds. Each set comes with a cartridge that contains the animation guides. Aside from the sets that the system offers, the collection is scalable as teachers can easily create new animation exercises and share them with the community.

The community serves to provide a space for exchanging knowledge and material generated using the system and discuss new methods of teaching using stop motion animation.

This month's column is devoted to an article called A Mathematician's Lament, written by Paul Lockhart in 2002. Paul is a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York. His article has been circulating through parts of the mathematics and math ed communities ever since, but he never published it. I came across it by accident a few months ago, and decided at once I wanted to give it wider exposure. I contacted Paul, and he agreed to have me publish his "lament" on MAA Online. It is, quite frankly, one of the best critiques of current K-12 mathematics education I have ever seen. Written by a first-class research mathematician who elected to devote his teaching career to K-!2 education.

About a year ago, a friend posed to me the following question: ”Why do students plunk down $150,000 for a 4-year education at MIT when virtually all of the courseware is available free of charge online?” Not only was it a great question, but answering it is critical to bringing elite levels of higher education to the online masses.

Smarthistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook.

backchan.nl is tool for involving audiences in presentations by letting them suggest questions and vote on each other's questions. backchan.nl is intended for conference or event organizers who want a new way to solicit questions from the audience and make better use of question and answer time.

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere. We have 700+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan.

Podcasts from the University of Oxford

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the impacts of new media on human interaction.

Podcasts on culture and education

In collaboration with Flickr, Nikon provides tips for taking better photos!

How to take good notes of lectures

Gapminder turns boring statistics into something new and interesting, using visualizations and animateions. The Gapminder Goal: enable you to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics.

"The positive effects of homework are largely mythical. In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research. The results are nothing short of stunning. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any aca