Offering Adequate Pedagogical Progression via Mobile Equipments——Experiment of a French Engineering School

Students may enter our 5-year engineering school in France at two levels; first and third year. However, due to their quite different backgrounds (this is especially true for third year students) , we need to provide newcomers with a 6-week training period during which they follow classes in the fields where they particularly feel weak. Unfortunately, depending on the student' s background, this is not always possible to bring him/her to the expected level. Another aspect one needs to mention is that these students may not have the same weaknesses in a given field. However, for economical reasons, those classes follow a uniform program as it is not feasible to provide a customised progression. In this paper we discuss how to redesign a mathematics course so as to offer tailored exercise sequencing. Groups of 20 students could then draw their exercises from an intranet database according to their previously completed work, try to solve it by themselves, request additional hints and even ask for some direct help from the teacher. Such a database is currently under development. If it turns out several students stumble against the same difficulty the teacher could show the whole class room how to solve it using the digital projector. This project goes one step further than our initial mobile education project (2003 - 2004 ). Until recently, we had used the equipment in a unique direction, from the instructor toward the students. Here, in this new project we are focusing on the whole loop in order to offer a more adequate (personalized) pedagogical progression ; from the student to the teacher (when the tablet PCs are monitored by the teacher) , and back toward the students (when a direct help is provided by the teacher).

Students may enter our 5-year engineering school in France at two levels ： first and third year. However, due to their quite different backgrounds （ this is especially true for third year students ）, we need to provide newcomers with a 6-week training period during which they follow classes in the fields where they particularly feel weak. Unfortunately, depending on the student＇s background, this is not always possible to bring him/her to the expected level. Another aspect one needs to mention is that these students may not have the same weaknesses in a given field. However, for economical reasons, those classes follow a uniform program as it is not feasible to provide a customized progression. In this paper we discuss how to redesign a mathematics course so as to offer tailored exercise sequencing. Groups of 20 students could then draw their exercises from an intranet database according to their previously completed work, try to solve it by themselves, request additional hints and even ask for some direct help from the teacher. Such a database is currently under development. If it turns out several students stumble against the same difficulty the teacher could show the whole class room how to solve it using the digital projector. This project goes one step further than our initial mobile education project （ 2003 - 2004 ）. Until recently, we had used the equipment in a unique direction, from the instructor toward the students. Here, in this new project we are focusing on the whole loop in order to offer a more adequate （personalized） pedagogical progression ： from the student to the teacher （when the tablet PCs are monitored by the teacher）, and back toward the students （when a direct help is provided by the teacher）.