Building Learning Communities 2014

SmartGraphs is a project that studies the educational value of digital objects embedded in graphs that “know” about themselves and that provide scaffolding to students to help them learn about graphs and the concepts conveyed in graphs.

Digital SmartGraphs can be authored or customized by teachers and accept inputs from students’ responses, sketches, functions, models, and probes. The software analyzes the graphs for the kinds of features that experts recognize and then engages students in conversations that instruct and assess student knowledge.

SmartGraphs is guided by collaboration between the Concord Consortium and the Pennsylvania State Department of Education Classrooms for the Future program, through which 145,000 laptop computers are deployed to serve 500,000 students. Other states, districts, or schools that are also interested in providing meaningful software to help students interpret visual graphical data from existing graphs or real time data collected with probes will thrill with this free Open Source software tool!