Abstract:

This work had the theoretical support of the Ontosemiotic Approach (OSA) of Godino and collaborators to analyze the facets of the didactic suitability of a remote didactic intervention of teaching and learning of the theme "Adjustment of curves and interpolation" in a Numerical Calculus course of 2nd-grade students. year of higher education in Control and Automation Engineering from the Federal Institute of Education of Pará – IFPA, Campus Belém (Brazil). These students were 17 boys and 3 girls, and the remote intervention took place due to the pandemic situation of Covid 19.

A guidebook was prepared to contemplate the epistemological construction of the theme to minimize the errors and difficulties identified (semiotic conflicts). In addition to the theoretical contribution of the topic, the script was made with several examples of free software computer programs - Octave with algorithms for development by students of computational thinking. Therefore, this guide guides the technological approach – excel and octave programs. In this way, students could recognize the same mathematical object in different representations – aiming to minimize the semiotic conflicts detected a priori and, perhaps, accentuated by remote teaching. Also used a textbook (Brazilian author) with the same objective as the script, as it is widely used to support Numerical Calculus courses at the Institute.

This research is part of doctoral work. Here it has a qualitative character with an interpretive standard. The didactic intervention used tasks and tests to evaluate how students appropriated knowledge using technology in conjunction with materials manipulatives and student opinion surveys. Here are the research questions: What technology elements motivated students to overcome their errors and difficulties (semiotic conflicts)? What opinions did the students have about this didactic intervention with technology?

In the first classes of the theme "Curve fitting and interpolation", the theoretical concepts of curve fitting by the method of least squares for a straight line and a parabola were presented, and its general formulation was generalized (2 lessons of 50 minutes), supported by the built script. Examples of problem-solving were introduced to solve manually or with the help of excel, Octave and mobile applications (2 lessons of 50 minutes). A task was made available for each student to solve, preferably with one of the tools already used (1 lesson of 50 minutes). Regarding polynomial and Lagrange interpolation, the same steps were used. In the students' opinion, they preferred to use the Octave tool, as it involved programming. They found excel and interesting mobile applications but did not use them to complete the assigned tasks. In the end, a test to assess the knowledge of this topic was carried out by the students, and it was found that they had, as a general rule, acceptable performances. They found this approach essential and interesting, with a view to future applications of Numerical Calculus and the Octave as a programming tool. The students also mentioned that it was difficult to accomplish their tasks since they were remote classes.

Keywords:

Numerical Calculus, Ontosemiotic Approach, Technology.