VISUALIZATION OF PARAMETRIC FUNCTIONS AS A TOOL FOR TEACHING MATHEMATICS
Institute of Technology and Business (CZECH REPUBLIC)
About this paper:
Conference name: 10th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 2-4 July, 2018
Location: Palma, Spain
Abstract:
Mathematical knowledge is the foundation of both technical and practical learning in many fields. Therefore, it is necessary to understand their improvement as key.
At present, we encounter great deficiencies in knowledge, both trivial and advanced mathematics. The greatest ignorance is generally in the area of elementary functions, which we understand as fundamental in terms of the content of our students' studies, which are also mainly concerned with the technical fields.
During the first contact with university mathematics, the students of all disciplines are confronted with the basic information of the theory of graphs, the rule of function and the subsequent use of the features of the individual functions to be known from the secondary school environment. Based on our experience in recent years, we can expect an average level of knowledge of linear and quadratic functions. For other functions, ignorance is so great that the interpretation and other use of these instruments are very problematic.
Just because of the vast differences in students' awareness and the effort to bring them a relatively broad range of knowledge, visual aids to the study of function graphs emerged. This is a simple outline of the behaviour of graphs depending on the change of individual constants. Students have the opportunity to test how the graph of the function behaves when they change values of its parameters arbitrarily.
In the first stage, the support for the linear, quadratic, cubic, quaternary function and function for square and cube root is processed.
Due to the general availability, the MS Excel program was chosen for this visualization. Students of our school are able to download MS Office for free.
It is a supportive learning solution that should encourage students to become more involved in an area that generally requires greater attention.Keywords:
Graphs, Functions, teaching, visualization.