“Novices”: The so-called novices were pupils from secondary schools in Hanover that
took part in our support and research program MALU3 for fifth graders, which started
in November 2008. These pupils came to our university once a week for 1.5 hours and
worked on problems for about half of this time (see Rott 2011; 2012 for details).
“Experts”: The so-called pupil experts were successful participants of mathematical
competitions, namely of the final round of the German Mathematical Olympiad4 in
2009/10 (8 pupils of grade 5 and 6) and price winners of the Mathematical Kangaroo5
in 2009 (2 pupils of grade 6). We visited the venue of the Olympiad and the school of
the Kangaroo winners and asked the pupils to take part in our problem solving activity;
the pupils did so voluntarily and have not worked with their video-partners beforehand.