Matemàtiques a l’educació secundària amb suport d’Scratch

Abstract

My interest in educational aspects began many years ago when I was a teenager and enjoyed coaching children in sporting disciplines such as football or handball. I could say that the theoretical strategy classes were my first contact with education. A few years later, at the university, I began to teach tutorials lessons for children. Back then I started considering how to become a good teacher. It was at that time, whilst I was studying didactics at university, when the idea of teaching Mathematics in a pleasant way first popped into my mind. It was a response to my students’ negative reactions every time they faced new content. Since then giving a recreational view to my Maths reviewing classes has been a challenge. I consider that with a suitable approach and the right set of tools everybody can be successful learning how to solve all types of mathematical problems. Throughout the years this idea has become more and more important to me and subsequently it has now turned into a challenge. Therefore the dice had already been cast when I had to decide the topic for this research paper: I will focus on taking recreational and intuitive software into the classroom. I wondered which could be the best way to introduce new mathematical notions to students. How can I do it in the most pleasant way. How can I use new IT-tools. I found the answer to these questions in the programming language scratch. An intuitive programming language that I found watching Frank Sabaté videos: http://scratchcatala.com/divulgacio/creacio-de-videojocs-a-laula/. Since April 2015 I had the opportunity to put into practice all these concepts in a high school in Barcelona during a couple of hours a week. My work was to develop the probability and statistics curriculum to my twelve years old students (2o ESO). I created several scratch programs to explain the subjects of statistics and random processes. After adjusting the tasks to the pupils' needs I have worked with, the outcome should be highly rated due to the fact that we could successfully work the mathematical and digital competences at once. The students who previously were good they continued doing well, moreover those whose results were not the best, got involved and their results have improved significantly. I firmly believe that this should be the path to follow.