Preface

I do not see myself as a member of the CAS research community, but as a member of the mathematics education community. I have had the opportunity to accompany a multi-year TI-92 school-project of my colleague Edith Schneider some years ago. I also had the opportunity and the pleasure of taking part in all the CAME Symposia so far. I learned a lot from the lectures and the discussions at these conferences as well as from different research papers of their participants. There is no doubt, that these papers are dealing with very important and useful theoretical and practical questions and problems with respect to the use of CAS in mathematics classrooms: Important theoretical considerations and empirical observations about students ´ learning behaviour and processes when using CAS, about opportunities and obstacles, about teachers ´ behaviour when integrating CAS into the classroom, about changes in the social organisation … and so on. What I am missing a little bit is the perspective of general mathematics education, the anchoring of the use of CAS in an adequate framework of general mathematics education for all. Such a perspective could give orientations for many considerations and decisions regarding curriculum and CAS-supported teaching and learning. In my following explanations I will illustrate this and focus on operating knowledge 1 This text is based on ideas and papers of R. Fischer, E. Schneider and W. Peschek, University of Klagenfurt – see references