Brian was inspired to enter the teaching profession by media coverage of the Cockroft Report in 1982, which drew attention a critical shortage of qualified mathematics teachers. Having graduated with an engineering degree from Glasgow University and practiced as an engineer for ten years, he then completed a Post Graduate Certificate in Education at Worcester College of Higher Education with the intention of teaching mathematics in secondary schools.

However, having an engineering qualification and background, he entered the Further Education sector and taught electrical engineering subjects. He also developed skills and taught what was then called the "new-technology" subjects of microprocessors, machine code programming and related computer studies and programming.

This led to an interest in using the computer as a teaching aid and Brian has contributed numerous demonstrations and exercises for mathematics which can be downloaded from the Further Education Resources for Learning (FERL) website, http://www.ferl.org.uk/

Brian’s current interest is the research and development of pedagogic use of information and communications technology (ICT) for teaching mathematics. He has just completed his MPhil - the abstract can be found here.

Brian is staying with the Centre and his thoughts on future research are:

"It's to do with:-

• SKEMP: Maths is a hierarchy of concepts. Concepts are created by seeing/experiencing examples of the concept, not by being given a definition of the concept. Higher order concepts cannot be properly/reliably created unless the necessary supporting concepts are in place.
• AFFORDANCES (opportunities) for learning/concept creation, using technology:
• They usefulness of an affordance is a function of 1) its visibility (can you find it?) and 2) how easy it is to use ( I've found it but how do you make it work?)
• CAS, spreadsheets, Maple, SPSS, Graphics calculators, etc., provide lots of affordances. Their usefulness for learning, however, can be limited because 1) the visibility of an affordance (facility provided by the software) is low because of the vast range of facilities provided, and 2) how to make use of the facility is not easy for the new user.
• How can we create useful (highly visible and easy to use) affordances appropriate to the needs of individual students at particular staged of their mathematical development."

bwatson@plymouth.ac.uk