Home: The Investigative Philosophy
The logistics of the computer portion of teaching TERC
Examples of K - 5th Grade Student Work
If you are on this page you either use TERC in your school, or you have read about TERC and want to explore using the Investigations type of curriculum that TERC offers to teach math to elementary students.
For Kindergarten through Second-Grade TERC Investigations provides a choice of software that allows the user to manipulate pre-created geometric shapes.
In Kindergarten through Second-Grade students use six basic shapes to discover through their exploration important mathematical concepts such as pattern, number, measurement, and relationship. They are exposed to geometric terminology and concepts of form and dimensionally. As in all TERC instruction the use of software is meant to augment the classroom instruction. This does not mean you can not present student computer lessons without the classroom lessons, but it will require more time in preparation and follow through.
In Grades three, four, and five Investigations uses a program called Geo-Logo which is a very powerful programming language development by an MIT scientist studying Artificial Intelligence. Professor Seymour Papert started with a robot that would take simple commands to move and draw as it did. What makes it so powerful and so adept at using the computers as a constructivist tool is that once one teaches a series of movements to this robot (know as a turtle, and now represented as a cursor on the computer screen) the computer remembers this set of commands as one word.
If you
have iMac, iBooks, or any OS 8.6 computers |
| To use the Investigations software on a standalone computer you simply need to turn off any security programs such as Fool Proof, copy the complete folder for the program into your applications folder, and make an alias that will go into the student items folder. If you are using Multiple Users with restricted application use you'll need to pick the program for each user you want to have access to it. |
To use the Investigations software with computers that are networked and use MacManager and Network Assistant or At Ease you will need to do few steps to get the programs working. First you need to load the software on to your Teacher Station. Second you need to choose the application for each workgroup you want access to it. Third, you need to download the folder that holds the program into the documents folder of each of the stations that are on the network. If you have Network Assistant you can choose this option. |