Design of a contextualized situation for early introduction of functional thinking
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48489/quadrante.23602Keywords:
design-based research, functional thinking, elementary education, models and modelingAbstract
This article documents the design process of a Model Eliciting Activity (MEA), contextualized in a situation aimed to engage elementary students in the creation of security codes to develop the notion of function by establishing a correspondence rule between two sets (letters and numbers). The Models and Modeling Perspective (PMM) pedagogic approach guided the MEA design and refinement. Based on a design-based research methodology, two iterative cycles were conducted to design and refine the MEA. The first cycle was implemented with 8 teachers, and the second with 21 elementary students (11 years old). The analysis of the design process was based on the PMM pedagogical principles, the emergent participants’ models and the teachers’ feedback. The teachers’ feedback helped to anticipate possible solutions that elementary students could develop, and the participants’ models provided information about the affordances of the MEA to introduce the notion of function in early school grade levels.
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