Prospective Teachers’ Interactive Visualization and Affect in Mathematical Problem-Solving

Research on technology-assisted teaching and learning has identified several families of factors that contribute to the effective integration of such tools. Focusing on one such family, affective factors, this article reports on a qualitative study of 30 prospective secondary school mathematics teachers designed to acquire insight into the affect associated with the visualization of geometric loci using GeoGebra. Affect as a representational system was the approach adopted to gain insight into how the use of dynamic geometry applications impacted students’ affective pathways. The data suggests that affect is related to motivation through goals and self-concept. Basic instrumental knowledge and the application of modeling to generate interactive images, along with the use of analogical visualization, played a role in local affect and prospective teachers’ use of visualization

Exact internet accessible computation of paths of points in planar linkages and diagrams

Dynamic Geometry, also known as Interactive Geometry, refers to computer programs where accurate construction of (generally) planar drawings can be made. The key characteristic of this software is that, when dragging certain elements of the configuration, the geometric properties of the construction are preserved. In this paper, we describe an educational web-based application that complements standard dynamic geometry programs in a mathematically sound manner. We put the focus on computing the geometric locus of distinguished points in linkages and other geometric constrained configurations, since knowing the equations of such loci is a typical engineering task. The tool is located at http://nash.sip.ucm.es/LAD/LADucation. html