Abstract:

The evolution of society driven by the digital age has brought significant changes in the school dynamics and, in particular, in the classroom by the influence of several technological and digital platforms. One of the devices that has more impact on the daily lives of all people, and especially young people, is the mobile phone. Currently, these devices have several features that enable the use of multiple apps simply and easily as calculator, stopwatch, timer, the camera ... Concurrently with this, existing smartphones also enable, easily, the use of apps that allow for example QR codes reader.

Mobile phones daily accompany students, and are currently computers in small size but there use is generally not allowed in the classroom and exist even specific legal regulations for this purpose in Portuguese schools. However smartphones can provide teachers with numerous tools to support the teaching processes by developing innovative teaching and learning contents. For students it could increase their motivating for learning and give them the opportunity to contact with applications and resources that the school doesn’t have available to everyone. Because of this, it is essential that the school becomes able to include these devices in the pedagogical and didactic framework in order to improve learning.

In this abstract we present a didactic experience in the context of the classroom, using smartphones and QR codes, which have proven to be powerful in problem solving and in investigative tasks by the motivational factor that triggered in the students. This code enables dynamic interaction with different apps, easy access to different links, and the discovery of “secret messages”. Making use of these features and using the manipulation of Geogebra software, we have investigated the importance of using smartphones as a tool in problem solving and as pedagogical motivational resource. This study was developed during the school year of 2014/2015 in a Geometry course for future primary math teachers and has 76 participants.

The positive feedback from the work groups about the task and the resources presented allowed them to emphasize the motivation for learning, as a main feature, triggered fundamentally by the curiosity on discovering what it was behind each code.

The didactic experience is integrated in a project rewarded by the Polytechnic Institute of Porto as an Innovative Pedagogic Project in the Distance Learning.

Keywords:

m-learning, QR codes, smart phones, technologies.