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What is Softway?Softway is the West Australian trading name for Jonathan Hippisley. With a first degree in Economics from Trinity College Cambridge, Jonathan Hippisley spent eight years working in the City of London for two American Banks, The Bank of New York, and Mellon Bank. He moved to Australia in 1989, where he was employed as International Credit Manager for the integrated titanium dioxide mining and production company Tiwest. After 3 years in this position, he travelled to Calcutta, India, to work as a volunteer for three charitable organisations in succession: Future Hope, Loreto Day School, Sealdah, and the Missionaries of Charity, which at the time was still run by Mother Theresa. All of these organisations, among other things, offer educational assistance to street children. A common goal is get children, who have fallen outside the regular education system, back into regular education. A common problem is persuading schools to accept children who have fallen behind their peers, and whose ability is difficult to assess. How with a written test, do you assess the aptitude and educational potential of a child who cannot read or write? Frustrated and intrigued by this conundrum, Jonathan Hippisley returned to Australia, where he enrolled as a doctoral research student at the University of Western Australia. There he studied research into the assessment of learning potential by dynamic or interactive methods. This led to the development of a computer program which both generated simple arithmetic tests and offered context specific tuition. Dubbed Tests that Teach, the software not only generated the data required to complete a doctoral thesis but also earned praise from the teachers who participated in the research. Inspired by the success of his research and the praise his software earned from schools, Jonathan Hippisley developed a commercial educational software product: Active Math 2001. It was made available on CD for home users, or it could be professionally installed as a client/server application for schools and tutorial organizations. More recently Jonathan Hippisley has developed the Java Math Test. Based on the same fundamentals as Active Math, the Java Math Test is delivered via the web. It is therefore accessible by anyone anywhere at any time. It is also free, so as to make it accessible to children who are most in need. What are Active Math and the Java Math Test all about?Active Math is a set of interactive tests, that help to teach, or reinforce understanding, of the basic operations of mathematics. Originally written for Windows 2000, Active Math runs on all the later Microsoft operating systems, including Windows 7, and can be used at home for math practice, or at school as an efficient assessment tool. Applying Microsoft Data Access technology, Active Math can store data on your local hard drive or on a central file server. The Java Math Test, as the name suggests, was written in Java. It is delivered on the web via a Java Applet. In its current form, for ethical and legal reasons, no personal or demographic data is stored by the Java Math Test. Only item performance data is stored, for the purpose of building up an item bank. In its current form, the Java Math Test is purely a demonstration of concept, but it could easily be adapted for schools to store student performance data. How does the Java Math Test differ from Mathletics?Mathletics and similar products are essentially modern sophisticated "Drill and Practice" tools. They may offer fancy graphics, and they may pay lip-service to the curriculum, but they are first and foremost entertainment tools, with possibly some spin-off educational benefits. They are also commercial products, the prime objective of which is to return a profit to the developers. Active Math was developed as a psychometric tool to gather data for a doctorate and a number of academic papers on the subject of education psychometrics. It's theoretical methodology was developed under academic supervision at the University of Western Australia. The papers published in leading refereed education journals were subject to review by anonymous referees from the international academic community. The inspiration behind Active Math and the Java Math Test is solving the conundrum of how to assess the number skills of children with poor literacy skills. The target population includes older children and teenagers, who according to conventional paper assessment methods, have poor numeracy standards, but whose innate number skills may be underestimated by these methods. The design is therefore not laden with "graphics for kids". The presentation is simple and to the point, so older students are not alienated by it. Why are Active Math and the Java Math Test good for students?
Why are Active Math and the Java Math Test good for parents?
Why is the Active Math CD good for teachers?
Why is the Java Math Test good for teachers?In its current form the Java Math Test is not quite so convenient for teachers as the Active Math CD. It offers the major advantage for school administrators that it does not need to be installed, but for teachers, information on student performance can only be gathered by watching students while they perform the activity. However, the students can be shown how to monitor their own performance. The activities should therefore be self motivating for students, and they can report their progress to the teacher. |
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