Maple for Distance Education in Secondary Schools During the COVID-19 Emergency

Many educational institutions have been closed to contain the spread of COVID-19 and teachers took action to continue education through remote learning with the use of technologies. The context of this research is a community of Italian STEM teachers from different secondary schools, within the Ministerial Project PP&S-Problem Posing and Solving. The project involves the use of a Digital Learning Environment (DLE), a Moodle platform integrated with Maple. The research question is: what kind of support can Maple integrated in a DLE give for Distance Education? To answer this question, we considered teachers who used Maple through the DLE during this school year. We carried out an analysis on 74 courses to understand how much they used this type of resource; for what purpose it was used; and whether this type of resource is related to the participation of the students in the course. Analysis shows that there are teachers who have conducted the entire course with this teaching material. They have used Maple in a meaningful way to propose problem-solving activities, theoretical explanations, interactive resources, explanation of Maple commands and text of exercises and resolution. Representative examples of each category are shown. Student views of worksheets increase when teachers use at least three categories of worksheets within a course. In particular, student participation increases when using the problem solving methodology. This type of resources is very effective for online teaching, where immediate feedback and interactivity are essential to involve students more.