Abstract:

The challenges faced by mathematics teachers in recent years have been diverse, making it necessary to adapt the curriculum and rethink strategies and methodologies. Nowadays we are faced with a wide range of digital tools that can help the teacher in their teaching practices, giving the teacher the responsibility to select the one that best meets the desired goal to promote the acquisition of meaningful learning in students. In this research we applied Desmos, a free online resource, suitable for all levels of education that allows the implementation of specific tasks for teaching mathematics. An advantage of this feature is that it allows the teacher to create their own class and assign specific tasks, either created by themselves or using the existing activity base, allowing them to view, monitor, assess and discuss the answers/constructions of a whole class while the task is being carried out. When compared with other existing digital resources, Desmos has more potential in terms of symbolic writing, in the study and sketching of graphs of functions with parameter variation, geometric constructions and transformations, statistical calculations, and the demonstration/justification of conjectures. This study describes the process of implementing the digital resource Desmos in a sequence of mathematics lessons, with the purpose of analysing its potentialities in the monitoring and evaluation of the work developed by students in the study of linear functions. In this context, we present a pedagogical experiment developed between May and June 2021, with seventeen 14-year-old students from a class of a school in the northern region of Portugal. The experience took place face-to-face, using the functionalities "Classroom Activities" and "Graphing Calculator" of the digital resource Desmos. The study of functions is one of the most important throughout Elementary School, since it is necessary that students create solid bases to follow the exhaustive study carried out in secondary school, where functions predominate. Although there is a great concern and insistence of Mathematics teachers in this domain, difficulties still exist, even in students with good results in this subject. As instruments of data collection, we considered the students' productions, a pre-test and a post-test and photographic records. The results show that the use of the digital resource Desmos, as a resource to learn functions, led to a significant improvement in students' school results.

Keywords:

Mathematics learning, Linear Functions, Digital resources, Desmos.