Student

The students open up their laptops and Mrs. O’Connor passes out worksheets to the classroom. “Today we will be working on multiplication”, she announces. As the papers are being passed out Eric logs onto the A+ learning calculator, using his student username and the class password. He clicks on the button marked with the multiplication sign to indicate to the program that he will be doing multiplication problems. A multiplication sign appears between the equation and estimation boxes. Eric inputs the first problem “56 x 57” into the equation boxes. Then he puts his estimate into the three estimation boxes. He decides to round down the numbers, making his estimate “50 x 50 = 2500” and clicks the button labeled “Make a Guess”. All three of the boxes are highlighted red and a prompt appears “Your estimations are too far off, try again!”. He can see the same information pop up in the text box showing his history of attempts. This time he tries rounding one number up and the other down, but accidentally makes a typo when inputting the answer, inputting “50 x 60 = 3900” and clicks the “Make a Guess” button. This time, his answer is highlighted red and a prompt appears “Check your math and try again”. He fixes the answer, inputs “50 x 60 = 3000” and clicks “Make a Guess”, this time the program tells him it was a “Good Estimate!” and shows him the equation “56 x 57 = 3192”. He clicks the “Clear” button to make room for the next equation. Eric’s work continues this way for the list of problems, asking Mrs. O’Connor for help when he needs it.

Teacher

Mrs. O’Connor logs into her account after school using her password. As a teacher, she has more features open to her. Under student data, she chooses to look through the data for the week. Here, she sees a table that shows her how many guesses a student has made on each question and how much time they have spent on that question. She can also choose to show the data by classroom, organize the data by day, and switch to a graph to help her better visualize the data. She sees that the class is clearly having trouble with division problems, so she decides to write up a new division assignment for tomorrow. She also sees that Brian is taking a little bit long to answer his questions. She decides to observe his work more closely next class.