Group collaboration support in learning mathematics

Our objective is to construct the effective collaborative learning support environment. Students acquire knowledge from their activities in a group. On the contrary, a group activity is composed of learning activities of individual students. So, in our approach two support mechanisms are introduced: the mechanism which assists a group to accomplish a group task by generating hints for deriving answers, and the mechanism which promotes individual students in the group activity by pointing out differences between group's opinions and student's opinion privately. In this paper, we focus on learning collaboratively mathematical exercises and implemented these support mechanisms in mathematics by using diagrams effectively. Our experimental results make it clear that our mechanisms could promote the group discussion so as to derive answers and urge students to join into the group discussion positively.