Students teach students

Abstract

Distance learning experiments in mathematics and science education as well as in art education in Japan have initiated considerable increase in creativity of pupils, improvement of scholarship, and growth in understanding cultural characteristics of different regions. Based on these experiments, an environment for German-Japanese school education projects using real time interactive audio-visual distance learning between remote classrooms has been established. This has been done with elementary school children speaking in their native languages, translated by interpreters on the topics of symmetries in rectangles and stripes. It has been done with lower secondary students speaking in English on topics related to discovering, proving, and applying the Pythagorean Theorem. Another project is underway now with four pairs of Berlin and Tokyo schools, co-operating in environmental education, Japanese language education, literature (haiku), and music education. In these experiments, the pupils take over the teaching, a method that will be more and more important in the future of learning. Initiated and supervised by their teachers, the pupils select problems from some subject matter, they explore the Internet, and in groups of 2 or 3 they prepare teaching clips for their peers in the foreign country. This technique brings about both progress in personal learning as well as deep mutual understanding in difficulties and aptitudes of the learning partners. © 2001 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.