The ability to monitor each individual student from amongst a huge number, providing them with the right
feedback at the correct time is one of the most advantageous features of Moodle.
Figure 3: Instant Feedback
MBM offers talented and curious children (grades 3-9) extra-curricular activities in recreational mathematics
that develop their creative thinking and logic. Activities include four in-depth topics that are spread over the
school-year and, once uploaded, can be accessed anytime online, to be done at home or at school. The in-depth
topics are exciting, challenging and, most importantly, fun because it is based on the ideal combination of
content, pedagogy and technology. The Moodle platform enables this by allowing integration of a wide range of
resources; online booklets, a variety of questions, collections of problems and exercises, lecture notes; including
any kind of text-based or Html-formatted documents, multimedia resources such as graphics, video or audio
(e.g., MP3 files), PowerPoint, or Flash-based applications and Java applets (Goodwin-Jones, 2003) as in Figure
4 (applet from the booklet “Conway’s game of life” and applet from the booklet “Graphs and Mazes”).
Figure 4: Applets in Booklets
In addition to the in depth topics, participants receive a weekly newsletter with additional riddles and
challenges, the Mathletter. The Mathletter challenges and many other topics are discussed in the weekly chat
with the MBM team - researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science (see Figure 5). The chat is a unique
opportunity for participants to have a conversation, share their ideas and get feedback from researchers in one of
the world's leading science research institutions
Figure 5: The Mathletter and Chat
The Forums and especially the weekly chats eased the interaction with students in real-time and facilitated
interaction on an even level allowing students to share their opinions and suggestions; as a learning community,
it allowed students to share and discuss their knowledge and difficulties, and also help each other. We noticed
that at the beginning of the school year there were few students who participated in the chat, over time the
number of students who participated increased and more importantly there was an increase in the number of
active students who asked questions and contributed to the discussion (Figure 4).
There are two options for participation in the project: as an independent participant or as part of a class. In the
latter case, in addition to the staff, there is a math teacher that follows the students’ activities. The Moodle as a
learning management system allows the teachers to view the answers, see the dialogue in the forums and chats