This essay deals with the subject of communication through Facebook. In this survey we studied 100 youths from Karlstad and their communication habits and behavior patterns on Facebook. The social network site Facebook has since its start in 2004 made a mark in modern communication. Today in 2010 the site has more than 500 million users. This paper wants to study what happens to other types of communication.

Dyscalculia and General Mathematical Dificulties.

The aim is to examine how students with attention difficulties may demonstrate their mathematical understanding through visual representations. A curiosity about how students think about mathematics, national tests and Concepts cartoons has also permeated the study. With help of observations combined with interviews and actively work for a week, the study shows an idea of how visual representations can help students with concentration difficulties to stay focused on their tasks. I chose a selection of pupils to do some mathematical tasks from the national tests which they had not been able to solve before. Now in the form of Concepts cartoons, which I designed, they managed to solve the same mathematics data. In my study treatment and interaction reveals as key pillars for a successful educational work with the students with concentration difficulties. Thus, all pupils who previously have been unable to solve these assignments on the National test were now able to show their mathematical understanding supported by visual representations..

My aim with the experience-based essay is that I want to explore the implications of mathematics on children's development. I also want to examine my approach in relation to the various mathematical tasks. Why do we think that mathematics is important for pre-school children? What does the research say about how the teacher is thinking about mathematics? Can the teacher combine playing and learning and create meaningful moments and activities related to mathematics? I also want to explore our policies and the objectives that the teacher should relate to. What is required of me as a teacher in order to meet those goals?My essay is about mine and my boss?s view of the mathematical tasks that I usually perform in the preschool.

Gravitational lenses are unlike ordinary optical lenses, a phenomenon corrupting our optical view of the cosmos. When we look out intospace we see celestial bodies lying with astronomical distance from Earth. There is no guarantee that what we see out there in space is actually there where we are observing it, and it may be that we see multiple images of the same star! Studies have shown that thenumber of distorted images of an n-mass (n > 1) plane lens can not exceed 5(n -1) for lighter lenses or 5n for more massive lens. This mathematical thesis covers gravitational lensing and their properties that distort light rays coming towards us from distant celestial bodies. In addition of gravitational lensing, its properties and the proof of the maximum number of distorted images, a bigger part of this work even cover two very interesting mathematical tools - the so-called Schwarz function and Bezout theorem..

This study investigates the teaching strategies of four teachers, and determines which teaching strategies give better results in mathematics at the middle school level? Result here means the knowledge level of the students. The result has been measured through leave out a mathematical test, which I leave out designed. Teaching strategies have been assessed through interviews with teachers and observations of their lessons.My study shows that to go through the lessons thoroughly in the traditional way, and open discussions with the whole class are best for students achievements.The information available, however, is too limited to draw some general conclusions, but my study can be seen more like a counter-example to the general praxis that is short lectures and individual assessment with one to one communication when teaching mathematics..

This report documents the process of designing a laboratory exercise in Fourier analysis at Vetenskapens Hus (House of Science) in Stockholm. The lab is designed for high school students studying science or technical education. It focuses on the physicalunderstanding and mathematical description of sound, in particular music. A model of such a lab is presented in this work; containing a review of the mathematical theory, summary of educational research in the field, descriptions of the design process and of the investigativework that led to the final result. The designed material for the lab includes developed computer programs, visit leader tutorial and description for teachers. .

Swedish students' knowledge of both mathematics and reading comprehension has deteriorated in recent years. Scientists are discussing whether there is a connection between these areas and that the pupils deteriorating math skills may have something to do with their increasingly lower results in terms of reading comprehension. To investigate this possible connection, I conducted a survey among students in ninth grade and have come to the conclusion that the scientists are right: this connection absolutely exist. Students who received a high score on tasks designed to test students' mathematical problem-solving skills, also received high results on the reading comprehension test. And students who received a poor performance on the problem-solving tasks, were also low performers in the reading comprehension test.

In this thesis, the four types of math problems that occur in the digital educational math game Zcooly Affären 2 have been analyzed. Focus has been aimed at how the problems mediate instructions and mathematical concepts to players, and how the mathematical content is supported by the context within the game. The result shows both positive and negative aspects of the math problems, based on the theories for math education used in this thesis. Apart from the analysis of the game, this thesis also presents earlier research regarding what possibilities digital games possess as tools for learning. Researchers have partly different views on how digital games should be designed to enhance learning, and whether or not games are efficient to use for learning purposes..

In this master's thesis the problem of determining the uncertainty for an estimator of an unknown parameter is considered. The case we study is the estimation of gravity using a reversible pendulum. This involves the estimation of the point where two regression lines intersect. The estimated gravity is a function the coordinates of this point. One way to determine the uncertainty of this estimator is to use bootstrap methods.

At the department of Electronic Warfare Assessments at the Swedish Defence Research Agency in Linköping one of the activities is modelling and simulation of the duel between a robot and a target. The aim with this Master's thesis is to develop a simulation model of an hovering helicopter. First a theoretical description of the forces and moments acting on an helicopter is given. Then the equations of motion are derived. These equations are simplified to be valid only for a hovering helicopter and the result is a mathematical model.

In recent years, agile software development methods have become increasingly popular throughout the world. Today there are a number of different agile methods and they all rest on the Agile Manifesto that was formulated in 2001 as a reaction to the traditional software processes.The aim of this thesis is to make a survey of some of the agile methods used today and to see how they are being used in practice. It consists of two parts: a literature study and an interview study with people working in the software business. First, a definition of agile methods is proposed and a number of different agile methods are described. Second, the interviews are being analysed with special focus on communication, collaboration, expectations and results.

The purpose of the study is to examine how teachers and students believe that graphing calculators affect the teaching of high school mathematics courses. By becoming aware of this, teachers and teacher students have the opportunity to reflect on the use of graphing calculators in their teaching. The empirical base consists of interviews with teachers and a survey among students at two high schools in southern Sweden. The results show that teachers especially consider the graphing calculator as a tool, much like paper and pencil. They use it if and when it is deemed able to contribute in a significant way in their teaching, either to save time and/or to help deepen the understanding of various mathematical concepts and methods.

Product development cycles become shorter and shorter. The time from idea to market has become an important competitive factor. Despite this, methods used for making the product development process faster are surrounded with uncertainty about their efficiency. The purpose of the thesis is to describe the pros and cons of ?best practice? methods for shortening lead times and how these methods effect the lead times in research and development.

The aim of my study is to investigate how last year students in upper secondary schoolunderstand certain mathematical concepts, in particular the unit circle and its trigonometry.I have used intentional analysis to interpret student?s actions when they solve certain tasks onthe basis of a cognitive, situated and cultural context.Interviews with four university teachers in mathematics about the unit circle, trigonometry,and mathematical understanding, serve both as background for the study and as basis for adiscussion, where I relate students understanding to what the teachers want new students toknow about these concepts when they begin university studies in mathematics.The students were arranged in three groups with three students in each group. Each group waspresented with two tasks, one in which they were asked to calculate the cosine values for onepointed, one blunt and one straight angle, each located in a separate triangle. They were alsoasked to decide whether the points (0,71; 0,71) and d (1 2 , 3 2 ) are located on the unit circleor not.My conclusion is that students mainly have an operational conception of the unit circle andtrigonometry. The lack of structural conceptions result in difficulties in seeing connectionsbetween the concepts in unfamiliar situations.