Abstract:

Teaching in the 21st century commits teachers to innovation, to creativity. The challenge is understanding how to promote competences and abilities, like problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration, in a context of meaningfully experiences. In this sense, we intend to present a qualitative study developed with students of the 5th grade, where they were to discover area formulas through problem solving. Besides, students were challenged to draw a script and take photos, creating a collaborative animated gif to communicate the conjecture.

Thus, with this research we aimed to characterize and understand if the creation of learning environments that integrate technologies and collaborative work can contribute to involve students in the informal deduction of area formulas and to understand how they mobilize this knowledge when solving problems.

In order to structure and delineate this study, four research questions were formulated:
(1) Which are the main strategies used by students to communicate how they arrived at the formulas of flat figures?
(2) How did the students react to the usage of technology to deduct the area formulas of plain figures?
(3) Which strategies were used by the students to solve tasks of plain figures areas? (4) Which were the main difficulties shown by the students?.

Results suggest that this learning environment, where synergies were created between technologies and collaborative work, favors the students´ motivation, mobilization of communication strategies and the knowledge required to solve problems.

Keywords:

Area formulas, technology, gifs, collaborative work.