December 5, 6 and 7, 2017Brazilian Technology Symposium (BTSym’17)

José Guilherme Picolo and Rafael Prazeres da SilvaAdvisor Profª Ms. Estefania Bissoni

Universidade São Francisco

The school is the space which providesconditions for the learning to happen.Inside of it, the knowledge is presented tothe students as disciplines such as:Portuguese, Mathematics, History,Geography and so on. Each one has its rolein the construction of the students’knowledge, some being considered easierwhile others obstacles almost impossible toovercome as the case of Mathematics. Thedifficulties in learning the contents ofMathematics lead many elementary schoolstudents to lose their interest in the studies,to fail the exams and, consequently, to theschool failureAccording to Magina, Bezerra and Spinillo(2009), researchers and educators report thedifficulties experienced by the children toelaborate the concept of fraction. Thisdifficulty, most of the time, is related to theway this content is introduced to thestudents. Toledo and Toledo (1997) say thatboth in the textbook and the in theclassroom, the rational numbers areintroduced by the idea of fraction which istaught in a rigid way through illustrationsof situations of a continuous nature whichare distributed in n equal parts, and m ofthose parts are colored to represent thefraction m/n.The situation becomes worse in the lastseries of the elementary school when theoperations with fractions are consideredinside the students’ domain, but they canonly realize the fraction as two separatenumbers by a horizontal trace. According toMerlini( 2005, p.3),

With fractions appearances deceive.Sometimes the children seem to havea whole understanding of thefractions but they still do not have it.They use the fractions coherently,they solve some fractional problems,but some crucial aspects of thefractions still escape to them. In fact ,the appearances can be so deceivablethat it is possible that some studentscan pass the school without masteringthe difficulties and without anyonenoticing it.

The construction of knowledge aboutrational numbers in its fractional form hasbeen shown complex to be understoodthroughout the educational process. For thisreason, this research has the aim to describethe development of an applicative duringthe research of Iniciação Científica linkedto the course of Computer Engineering ofthe Universidade São Francisco.

Introduction

Result

References

Brazilian Technology Symposium - BTSym'17

MATHEMATICS TEACHING THROUGH MOBILE DEVICES: DEVELOPMENT FOR AN APPLICATION FOR THE APPROPRIATION OF THE FRACTION CONCEPT

Method

Objective

Fig 3. Average plot of attempts

Fig 1 – Home screen Fig 2 – Game screen example

Fig 4. Average Response Time Graph

By facing this issue, it was proposed thedevelopment of a mobile application with theobjective of helping students of the 6th grade ofelementary school to learn mathematicalcontent in school and outside it through the useof the cell phone.According to Brunno Brugnolo (2014), the useof technology can be beneficial in theinteractive study of contents, making themmore attractive and making students adopt amore participative position.

For the development of the application“Logicametria”, the students of ComputerEngineering of the Universidade SãoFrancisco – USF – used the AppInventorapplication, a tool which permits to developapplications for smartphones with Androidoperating system. To store the information ofthe application such as: students’ registration,teachers, time spent in each phase and numberof attempts, a data based allocated in an onlineserver using the language MySQL and theinformation management was done byphpMyAdmin.During the development of the application,the students faced some challenges related tothe scientific and technological areas such as:the integration of the database to theapplication and the site and the developmentof images with several layouts to fit thedifferent sizes of the mobile devices.

The result was the development of asmartphone application called“Logicametria”. The application has 25phases and 6 types of different games. Whenaccessing the application, the teacher hassome options to: register, alternate, list orexclude the students; while the participant hasaccess to the games aimed at learning themathematical contents such as fractions anddecimals.

This research permeates the area of educationwhich demands for technological innovationsthat may favor the educators’ work as well asthe students’ necessity. Besides that, it isnotorious the difficulty that most of thestudents have with Mathematics and the lackof incentives they have to study at home. Wecan conclude that the developed applicationcan be useful, available and suitable for thestudents that need a tool for the appropriationof the contents related to Mathematics andalso for the teachers as a new method ofevaluation.For the Computer Engineering students thisresearch allowed the knowledge of a newplatform of development with a newprogramming language, being of great valueto improve the programming studies as wellas for the reflection of the contents studiedduring the graduation and applied to theempirical use.

1. TBRUGNOLO, Brunno. O desafio de usar atecnologia a favor do ensino. Disponívelem: <http://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/educacao/o-desafio-de-usar-a-tecnologia-a-favor-do-ensino-ealmosyp83vcnzak775day3bi>. Acesso em: 09maio 2017.2. MAGINA, Sandra; BEZERRA, Francisco Brabo;SPINILLO, Alina. Como desenvolver acompreensão da criança sobre fração? Umaexperiência de ensino. RBEP: Revista Brasileira deEstudos Pedagógicos. Brasília, v. 90, n. 225, p. 411-432, maio/ago. 2009.3. MERLINI, Vera Lucia. O conceito de fração emseus diferentes significados: um estudo diagnósticocom alunos de 5a e 6a séries do ensinofundamental. 2005. Dissertação (Mestrado) –Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo.4. TOLEDO, Marília; TOLEDO, Mauro. Didáticada matemática: como dois e dois: a construção damatemática. São Paulo: FTD, 1997.