Abstract:

The Department of Mathematics in collaboration with the Department of Economics of the University of Salerno (Italy) have designed a transdisciplinary path focused on economic themes interpreted in a mathematical key. This activity was developed in the last classes of the scientific high schools participating in the experimental Mathematical High School research project, which was conceived by the Department of Mathematics of the University of Salerno, has spread to 12 other Italian Universities and currently involves over 160 High Schools on throughout the national territory. Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, the entire educational path that was designed to be carried out with activities in the presence, has been reworked and developed with remote teaching-learning, also thanks to the use of breakout rooms which have made it possible to organize group workshops. Through laboratory activities in which students were dealt in problems of choices and strategies derived from classical literature, the students were led to face economic concepts first in a heuristic way and then with rigorous formalization. In particular, the use of ruler and compass first and of a dynamic geometry software and apps on the web then, made it possible to apply the geometric properties of the plane that students already knew from the first years of High School to positioning problems that in traditional didactics require the study of multiple variable functions for solving optimal equilibrium problems. It was then demonstrated analytically to students that the solution obtained geometrically thanks to the Voronoi tessellation and the Delaunay triangulation is actually an equilibrium point and the solution of the Nash equilibrium problem. The various activities carried out by the students were monitored through the compilation of laboratory files, which was followed by a final questionnaire. The article will describe the methodology used to conduct the educational path and the results that emerged from the analysis of the documents produced by the students.

Keywords:

Transdisciplinarity, positioning problems, topology, technology-enhanced learning, remote learning.