The Server Room

Fantastic geometry/algebra software for nowt! - GeoGebra

Just a quick post this one, but hopefully useful to your Maths departments.

Take a look at these screenshots of GeoGebra. Now visit the GeoGebra WebStart page and click on the button (proper Java required). Amazingly this amazing piece of dynamic geometry software is not only free, but also runs without an installer, even under a standard user account. It will (optionally) create shortcuts and file associations for the pupil too. I’ve seen Java WebStart before and thought it was pretty nifty, but to be honest I’ve never really seen any truly worthwhile uses of it until now.

But that’s not all! You can even create web pages with your saved GeoGebra files preloaded into them (as in this GeoGebra example) - fully interactive worksheets with very little effort. There are more sites full of examples around the web, including these:

SLU.edu GeoGebra Applets (hard maths!)

Henrico County GeoGebra Applets (easy maths!)

For a school that has struggled through with Omnigraph for years and (I gather) tried some of the more expensive commercial oferings without luck, this is a real revelation. The large buttons make me think this could be a good tool for use on interactive whiteboards too.

Caveats & fixes

Unfortunately at the time of writing the author’s security certificate has expired. Depending on your settings this may cause some problems with the initial setup. Under Windows with Internet Explorer, try clicking OK to problems with the certificate. If you aren’t even given that option, put www.geogebra.at into your trusted sites list in IE, clear your cache and restart IE. As a network admin, you can add it to trusted sites for all or part of your domain via a GPO.