Abstract:

In the Primary Education classrooms, teachers reinvent each day various ways to transmit their knowledge to students so that they can learn the basics of elementary subjects. While it is true that each student requires a specific time for learning if you manage to capture their attention and transmit information in a simple way the task is greatly simplified. In this sense, more and more new methodologies are trying to facilitate learning to students and involve them from the beginning in the acquisition of new concepts. Visual Learning consists of a teaching/learning method that uses a series of graphic organizational patterns that help students learn more effectively, as well as organize concepts and collect ideas in a tangible way. This type of methodology allows to identify patterns and visualize concepts that otherwise require a greater cognitive development and a greater capacity for abstraction.

It is intended that the student, through the graphic representation of information and ideas, reinforce their understanding and integrate new knowledge (organizing, processing and prioritizing the presented information). The Arduino project began in 2005 focused on students at the IVREA Institute (IDII), in Ivrea (Italy), and since then, this free software company has been growing to this day, presenting diverse applications in the field of research, industry, and education. However, despite the fact that there are several proposals for the application of this tool in the classroom, most of them focus on the teaching of Programming and Robotics in subjects of Compulsory Secondary Education and Baccalaureate. Therefore, any effort to integrate these new technologies from an early age results in the idea of improving the quality of teaching, through the development of curricular practices that break down some content included in the law in a pleasant and effective way.

In this paper, we propose the incorporation of Arduino technology within the Primary Education classrooms as a tool for teaching mathematics. More specifically, an easy-to-program system has been implemented for teachers that allows performing arithmetic operations of positive integers and representing their results visually. The equipment consists of an Arduino board and a matrix of LEDs that visually represents the result of the arithmetic operations introduced by the students and illuminates the rows by breaking down the result into hundreds, tens and ones. In this way, it is possible not only to teach adding primary students in an interactive and visual way introducing them to new technologies but also to teach students the value of the position of each digit placed in a numerical figure. Therefore, the double purpose of involving teachers in the application of new active methodologies that go beyond the traditional classes on the blackboard and introduce students to the concept of algebraic addition through gamification and through experiential learning is fulfilled.

Keywords:

Innovation, Technology, Arduino, Maths, Elementary School.