The presented work is intended to serve as a teaching material in particular for pupils of the first year of secondary school, focusing on the basic knowledge of mathematics. The first part of the thesis is devoted to an analysis of existing web page, which corresponds to the theme of the diploma thesis. The evaluation takes into account the expertise as well as the scope of use of interactive elements. In the next part, the created teaching material in a form of web page is presented. It deals with the subject matter of powers, roots, polynomials and rational expressions. In accordance with current trend, the emphasis is put on both visualisation of curriculum (charts, use of graphics) and interactivity. All exercises to practise involve solution, therefore users are allowed to gain immediate feedback and thus to study individually. Web page is free available.

Many students struggle to make sense of algebraic expressions in math. This lack of understanding results in students making symbolic manipulation errors, hindering their procedural fluency. Researchers believe these errors are linked to students' lack of structural reasoning. While research has shown that students rarely engage in expert structural reasoning, little is known about how students actually reason structurally. In this study, I interviewed six high school calculus students to study the way they identified, matched, and evaluated structures as they solved problems involving rational expressions and equations. I analyzed the participant interviews and outlined the matching process they used and the types of evaluations they made during this matching process. Consequently, I was able to confirm that students were using structural reasoning throughout the tasks and that effective student structural reasoning was characterized by identifying structures using operational hierarchical reasoning and matching them to correct rules. These findings have the potential to help teachers better instruct students on using and identifying structure, leading to less frustration by students and teachers in algebra.

Quantitative aspects of systems, like the maximal consumption of resources, can be modeled by weighted automata. The usual approach is to weight transitions with elements of a semiring and to define the behavior of the weighted automaton by mul- tiplying the transition weights along a run. In this thesis, we define and investigate a new class of weighted automata over unranked trees which are defined over valuation monoids. By turning to valuation monoids we use a more general cost model: the weight of a run is now determined by a global valuation function. Besides the binary cost functions implementable via semirings, valuation functions enable us to cope with average and discounting. We first investigate the supports of weighted unranked tree automata over valuation monoids, i.e., the languages of all words which are evalu- ated to a non-zero value. We will furthermore consider the support of several other weighted automata models over different structures, like words and ranked trees. Next we prove a Nivat-like theorem for the new weighted unranked tree automata. More- over, we give a logical characterization for them. We show that weighted unranked tree automata are expressively equivalent to a weighted MSO logic for unranked trees. This solves an open problem posed by Droste and Vogler. Finally, we present a Kleene- type result for weighted ranked tree automata over valuation monoids.

Quantitative aspects of systems, like the maximal consumption of resources, can be modeled by weighted automata. The usual approach is to weight transitions with elements of a semiring and to define the behavior of the weighted automaton by mul- tiplying the transition weights along a run. In this thesis, we define and investigate a new class of weighted automata over unranked trees which are defined over valuation monoids. By turning to valuation monoids we use a more general cost model: the weight of a run is now determined by a global valuation function. Besides the binary cost functions implementable via semirings, valuation functions enable us to cope with average and discounting. We first investigate the supports of weighted unranked tree automata over valuation monoids, i.e., the languages of all words which are evalu- ated to a non-zero value. We will furthermore consider the support of several other weighted automata models over different structures, like words and ranked trees. Next we prove a Nivat-like theorem for the new weighted unranked tree automata. More- over, we give a logical characterization for them. We show that weighted unranked tree automata are expressively equivalent to a weighted MSO logic for unranked trees. This solves an open problem posed by Droste and Vogler. Finally, we present a Kleene- type result for weighted ranked tree automata over valuation monoids.