The Future of Education

Nowadays the integration between contents and new technologies can be considered as a founding and qualifying aspect of teaching from primary school to university. It is then very important, in order to ensure high educational and learning standards, to design and use new technology teaching tools able to integrate scientific and methodological precision with easy of use. However all the digital teaching product today on the market as, in particular, e-books or LIM – books, are nothing more that copies, in digital format, of the traditional paper books, sometimes including only some interactive figures (including examples pre - defined by author and not modifiable by teachers). Furthermore, especially when referring to Physics and Mathematics subjects, these tools don’t contain serious references to recent experimental results, innovative fields (as environmental or health protection) or to every day applications. In this paper the prototype of a novel e-book, to be used in Physics and Mathematics courses at secondary school and University, is proposed. It is realized by using, as interactive and calculation interface, the famous and powerful software Mathematica, produced by Wolfram. The flexibility of this software together with the novel design of theoretical and applied teaching approach have allow us to realize a completely interactive product in which every important features is fully customizable and upgradable by the teacher. In particular, in the theoretical sections, mathematical formulas are not static elements but “living” calculation tools (symbolic and / or numeric) in which teachers and students could insert numerical values and / or analytical expressions in order to very or modify a numerical or symbolic result and then can be also used for the exercises resolution. The exercise section contained in our project, founded on GUI interface, represents a virtually infinite source of training since both teacher and student can create new quizzes and more or less complex exercises by changing the input and / or output requirements with a few clicks or by the introduction of new numerical parameters. But the most innovative feature of this projects is represented by the presence, within the e-book, of a complete virtual mathematical and physical laboratory (the latter able to control, through an hardware programmable interface, real scientific instruments) in which teachers and students can completely customize the proposed experiments or making their own ones, creating true simulation of physical phenomena or animations reproducing algebraic or geometrical concepts. The project, although firstly covering Physics and Mathematics, can be easily extended to all the other scientific subjects. Finally it is important to outline that, due to the use of cdf format, using the e-book doesn’t need for the installation of Mathematica software on all the machines (pc, mac, smartphone or tablets) where it runs.