O pensamento computacional e as suas conexões com o ensino e a aprendizagem da Geometria

Abstract

Learning Geometry can be considered a major experience in people’s lives because it enables students to develop problem-solving skills and their own perception of reality. However, not always the content presented in school curriculum is sufficient to meet students needs, specially because society has been continuously adapting its demands to fit in a Digital Culture world. Recently many teachers and researchers have been focusing in the development of Computational Thinking, due to its relations to our current digital society and also its possibilities to stablish connections with teaching and learning processes of all areas, including Mathematics. Considering these possibilities, this paper aims to investigate the connections between Computational Thinking and Geometry teaching and learning processes. This research focuses on a qualitative approach based on the methodological perspectives of Didactic Engineering. It was divided into four steps: preliminary analysis, a priori analysis, experimentation and a posteriori analysis and validation. The procedures happened in five meetings with 10 students from 8th grade of a public school in Campina Grande, Paraíba (Brazil). During the classes, five activities were developed using resources such as GeoGebra, colored paper triangles, measuring instruments, printed worksheets and a game developed by the researchers called “Congruence Game”. The results obtained revealed that many connections can be stablished between Computational Thinking and Geometry, specially with the content of Congruent Triangles. We demonstrated the relation between abstraction and the recognition of features of geometric figures, abilities widely used by students during the activities. In addition to these connections, the results also show a development of many skills and strategies to verify the congruence between triangles, which certainly students would not have developed through written exercises only. During the research, students were allowed to exercise their creativity, geometrical and computational thinking. We would also like to reinforce that there are many connections between Computational Thinking and the Geometry teaching and learning processes that can be considered with other contents, due to the extent of subjects covered in Mathematic curriculum in middle school. Therefore, other investigations are still necessary to elucidate these connections and to make them pedagogical tools to new educational practices, not only in Geometry but other fields of study as well.