Abstract:

A collection of Applets created with GeoGebra and embedded in a Website constitute the Single Variable Calculus’ Virtual Lab of the Facultad Regional San Nicolás (FRSN), Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Argentina. All the tools were made with the aim of motivating students and maintaining, or even improving, their interest in the issue.

GeoGebra, available from www.geogebra.org, is a free software that brings together geometry, algebra and calculus allowing diverse representations of mathematical objects.

This Lab is intended to show some animations of the fundamental concepts of Calculus, emphasizing the analysis of their geometric interpretations, diverse applications of these concepts and different self-assessments. In the geometric interpretation of definitions, visualization plays a key role.

The application of derivatives and integrals, for example, involve calculations that sometimes are long, boring, complicated or all at once. This Lab includes tools for analyzing intervals of increase or decrease and concavity of a function and for calculating the area between two curves, length of plane curves and area of surfaces of revolution, among others.

The objective of this paper is to present the Single Variable Calculus’ Virtual Lab that is announced for this academic year 2016. These Lab was designed for Calculus I course at the FRSN and will be in permanent evolution, as new tools are created or the ones existing are updated considering the experience of its use.

Keywords:

Virtual Laboratory, Calculus, GeoGebra.