Mathematics Experiences Through Image Processing (METIP)
Project Director: Steven Tanimoto

Department of Computer Science & Engineering,
University of Washington, Box 352350,
Seattle, WA 98195-2350 USA

A major educational problem in United States and some other countries is that students in grades K-12 lose interest in mathematics and science as they progress through school. Students often complain that mathematics is difficult and that they don't see much use for it past simple arithmetic. In response to these concerns, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has identified a number of features that the grades 5-8 curriculum should include in order to help motivate students to stay interested:

The goal of the METIP project is to use digital image processing to help meet these objectives. In particular, we have developed a series of applications designed to allow students to manipulate digitized images of their choice. These materials are intended to be used in enrichment activities rather than part of a standard classroom curriculum. Teachers can play various roles with these activities; for example, they can catalyze student learning by leading discussions of the concepts students have explored on the computer.

The METIP Project currently has a number of programs that allow students to explore mathematics with image processing:

These applications were developed primarily for 386/486/Pentium based PC's running Microsoft Windows. One application, the Pixel Calculator, is also available for the Apple Macintosh.

Here is a list of all the people working on the METIP project.

A closely related project we are involved with is the study of multiplayer educational activities. The METIP project is working to integrate the use of the WWW into its activities. Some ideas are described in Prospects for the Direct Use of Distributed Image Databases in Educational Image Processing.

Currently the project is collecting the experiences of users with its XFORM image transformation software. If you have done something fun or useful with the software please let us know. We are putting the current version of its documentation online. Here is a link to it.. A set of little demonstrations for XFORM has been put together by graduate students who took a seminar during the winter of 1996..

The XFORM programming environment, integrated with a subset of Common Lisp, offers the technical essentials for a new approach to learning and teaching computer programming --- the fundamental attraction of using this approach is that students learn to program the computer in the pursuit of creating neat visual effects with digital images portraying people or things of interest to them. If you have successfully installed the software and would like to discuss teaching programming this way, please contact us.

Links to some related projects are listed here.

METIP is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant number MDR-9155709.


bricker@cs.washington.edu or tanimoto@cs.washington.edu
Last modified: Tuesday, 6 February 1996.