Digital Technology in Secondary and Tertiary Mathematics Education

This issue is the second of a two-part special issue of Computers in the Schools on Digital Technology in PK-20 Mathematics Education.It focuses on the use of digital technology in secondary and tertiary mathematics education and includes four papers from the Czech Republic, Greece, the Russian Federation, and the United States.It addresses the following key question posed in the call for papers for the special issue: How does digital technology allow one to teach mathematics differently at the secondary and tertiary school levels?All the papers in the collection focus on procedural technologies, i.e. those where the designer intention and the algorithmic operation of the technology are defined.Given the rapid growth in the use of AI enabled approaches in K-12 education and beyond, this collection in a sense acts as a reminder to consider and perhaps preserve the ongoing value of other approaches in the use of technology in mathematics education.The first paper in the collection, titled "Using dynamic software in teaching roof design, " written by Svtlana Tomiczkov from the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic, describes the use of dynamic geometry software GeoGebra (Hohenwarter, 2002) at a technical high school to support teaching a course on descriptive geometry with application to civil engineering.The topic of roof design as part of the technical high school curriculum is important from a STEM education perspective as it links theoretical foundations of descriptive geometry with practical problems of civil engineering.The projective methods of descriptive geometry, as shown by the author when teaching the subject matter at the tertiary level, are especially useful in solving an applied problem of roof design.Tomiczkov extends her university teaching experience to the secondary STEM education classroom where students are younger and more diverse in their learning abilities.In that context, her study shows that by combining two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) graphical windows of GeoGebra, the entire design process of roof construction can be demonstrated, thereby enabling a better understanding of the process by a mixed ability group of high school students.Providing such multi-dimensional combination of graphical windows is not straightforward though for it requires special skills in preparing GeoGebra for teaching applied problems of descriptive geometry.In terms of the plane geometry, the building plan used by the secondary school students has the form of a polygon, and the very roof is made of planes.Several examples of the floor plan used in the teaching were presented in the paper including a concave L-shaped hexagon as well as two overlaying rectangles forming another concave octagonal structure.Tomiczkov compares two digital tools-Rhinoceros (Cheng, 2007) and GeoGebra-and notes that while the former tool is static, the latter tool is dynamic, and it allows for a more efficient integration of digital technology in teaching.More specifically, the availability and use of dynamic software enables powerful interactive demonstration, both through 2D and 3D representations, of