After UNESCO declaration of year 2000 as a World Mathematical Year, and with the aims of contributing to the quality of Math teaching and of disseminating the work done using Information and Communication Technology, the Virtual School of the European Schoolnet (EUN), through its Department of Mathematics, and the Education Department of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Autonomous Government), through PIE (Programa d'Informātica Educativa - ICT in Education Programme), with the collaboration of Sun Microsystems, call for Submissions to the MATHPLETS'2000 contest of educational Applets with mathematical content.

This contest is addressed to European teachers, students and any European Academic institution working on the application of ICT in the teaching of Maths as a way of stimulating its creativity and fostering the production and availability of useful teaching and learning materials on the Internet.

• Work submitted to MATHPLETS'2000 must consist of applets or sets of applets, written in Java^TM language embedded in a Web page or in a set of them, making an unitary and coherent whole.

• These applets must illustrate some mathematics topics from primary and/or secondary education curricula of European countries or regions, while fostering the attainment of the mathematical skills of the students. Such applets or consistent sets of applets will be referred to as MATHPLETS.

• Teachers, students and institutions, both individually and in teams involved in Academic European Institutions can apply. Only one submission per individual/team will be accepted.

• Individuals or team coordinators should register for the contest by filling the form lying at http://www.xtec.es/vs/mathematics/inscription_ang.html or sending a message to mathplet@pie.xtec.es with the following:

  • Title and an abstract of the MATHPLET.

  • Name of the author or coordinator and his/her postal adress, telephone number and e-mail address.

  • in case of teams, a name for it and names and personal data of each one of its members.

  • Name, postal adress, telephon number and Internet adresses (e-mail, Web) of the educational institutions where the authors work.

  • The URL where the MATHPLET will be accessible.

• Deadline for inscriptions is May 30^th, 2000.

• MATHPLETS must be published in a web page of a European Academic institution. Institutions may range from local level (schools, municipalities, etc.) to regional, state and communitary ones. Deadline for publication is june 15^th, 2000.
  The organising institutions (PIE, EUN) offer to authors who need it the possibility of publishing their materials in their Web spaces. Contact mathplet@pie.xtec.es for this purpose.

• Works must be accessible in any European language and, at the very least, in English.
  All user information and interaction messages will be grouped in a public final class that should be compiled separately from the rest of the work, or in a *.properties file, in order to facilitate the production of multilingual versions of the materials.
  The source code of the public final class or the *.properties file that contains all warning and interaction messages to the user must be sent to organisers of the contest by sending it in a message to mathplet@pie.xtec.es before deadline for publication.
  Participants will authorise the organisers of this contest to translate the materials of the awarded MATHPLETS to any European language. Moreover, they will allow its use in any European Academic institution. For this reason, participants must send the source code of the public final class or the *.properties file of messages.

• Materials used must belong to the authors or they must have the proper copyright permission. This is the authors' sole responsibility.
  The submission of materials to this contest does not imply the transfer of property but the authorisation for educative use in any European Academic institution.

• Assessment criteria are:

  • Relevance to European curricula.
  • Innovation in the topic and in the didactic methodology.
  • Interactivity and user friendliness.
  • Easiness of use of the materials.
  • Adequacy to the content and objectives of the curricula.
  • Integration and coherence.

• A jury selected by the organisers of this contest will evaluate submissions. Jury determinations are unappealable.

• Prices for the awarded MATHPLETS are:

  • A Sun Ultra 10 workstation including Ultra Sparc IIi proc, 128 MB RAM, 9 Gb HD (allowing extension to 2), Graphic Card PGX 24, CD-Rom 24x, Monitor 17'', 4 PCI Slots.
  • Two Sun Ultra 5 workstations including Ultra Sparc IIi proc, 128 MB RAM, 9 Gb HD, Graphic Card PGX 24, CD-Rom 24x, Monitor 17'', 3 PCI Slots.

• Delivery of awards to the MATHPLETS selected by the jury will take place the July 5th, during the cem 2000, Congrés d'Educació Matemática, I Jornades d'Educació Matemática a Catalunya. Mataró, Spain, activity organised by the Federació d'Entitats per a l'Ensenyament de les Matemàtiques a Catalunya satellite of the Third European Congress of Mathematics, organised by the Societat Catalana de Matemàtiques, and under the auspices of the European Mathematical Society