Electronic proofs in mathematics education — A South African Teacher Professional Development (TPD) course informing the conceptualisation of an e-proof system authoring support workshop

Within a collaborative German project, an Electronic Proof System for supporting learners in gaining proof competences and teachers in the assessment of mathematical proofs is developed. Our vision is the development of an adaptive learning, test and diagnostic system, including the substantial and methodological potential of fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks to include a tutorial component for learning, on the one hand and, on the other hand, to improve the automatic correction and to enable an automatic valuation with possibly low manual correction efforts. Thereby, the correction effort shall be kept as low as possible while having preferably high freedom degrees. The theoretical framework determines the structure of the IT environment. A first prototype was developed using IMathAS (www.imathas.com/), a web-based mathematics assessment tool for delivery and semi-automatic grading of mathematical homework. To enable offline use, a JavaScript-based prototype was developed using the appearance of IMathAS. This way, an authoring support tool could be developed to facilitate the creation of E-proofs. So far, no big community of authors contributes to public libraries of such E-proofs. For this reason, the collaboration of and sharing between different institutions should be cultivated and the awareness of the existence of an open-source E-proof system has to be increased. A Community of Practice as a collaborating group of people sharing the same aims is supposed to be established starting with the development of a Teacher Professional Development (TPD) based on a South African concept to promote the vision and idea of the project and to facilitate the access to the E-proof system.