Many students at secondary school level and beyond have difficulties in mastering algebraic skills. Often the algebraic manipulations are carried out in a superficial way, using rules that are not meaningfully connected with the underlying concepts. To help secondary school students to develop real algebraic understanding (insights and concepts) and to learn and practice algebraic skills in sense-making ways, designers of the Freudenthal Institute have developed several sequences of programs, Java applets, that
(1) enable students to connect the formal mathematical activities in a meaningful way with the underlying concepts;
(2) provide exercises with verification of the correctness of intermediate computational steps entered by a student and with appropriate feedback, and with scoring facilities in a game-like setting.
Later these applets were integrated in a virtual learning environment, called the Digital Mathematics Environment (DME), in which information on the results and the learning could be captured. The DME is an answer to the fleeting character of the work with applets, which both students and teachers often experience. In the DME, a student logs in on a central server, works with an applet, and automatically receives feedback from the applet. Students’ results are stored on a central server. This allows the student to review his/her work, correct it, and continue it in any location with Internet access, particularly at home. The teacher can check and grade the students’ work and (s)he can monitor the learning process of individual students and of entire classes. Moreover, the teacher can use the authoring tool of the DME to design new activities and sequences, and make these available to groups of students or classes.
By using the SCORM export facility, the activities can be used in other learning environments as well.

Participants of the hands-on workshop can have a look at ICT-rich, interactive learning materials and at features of the Digital Mathematics Environment.