Digital technologies and mathematics education

In order to provide a context for the body of the report we invite readers to imagine they are travelling on a train together with students on their way to school. One student is finishing off his mathematics homework and struggling to solve some quadratic equations by factorisation. Another student, who has already diligently done her homework, is playing a realistic action video game on her smart phone. This scenario is, of course, designed to emphasise the stark contrast between the worlds of current (and past) mathematics education at school and the world in which many of our current students live most of their life