How to teach mathematical concepts through demonstrations?

The teaching of mathematics has been a challenge for many teachers, especially in the secondary stage.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
26 April 2023 Wednesday 03:51
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How to teach mathematical concepts through demonstrations?

The teaching of mathematics has been a challenge for many teachers, especially in the secondary stage. During adolescence, students face major changes in their lives and many may feel a certain lack of motivation for some subjects.

This lack of interest also affects mathematics, a science where much of the knowledge to be acquired may seem abstract and complex a priori. This causes many students to have certain difficulties in assimilating the mathematical concepts taught in the classroom.

In order to motivate the students and ensure that the learning of mathematics is lasting and deep, we can choose different learning strategies. One of them is what is known as mathematical demonstrations, which are activities that propose a guided practice to the students.

These activities, in a very visual way, explain the steps that students must take to develop mathematical thinking. Normally these demonstrations can be carried out with the help of other classmates and they have the support of the teaching staff for their development.

Mathematical demonstrations will help secondary school students to better understand and consolidate knowledge, leaving aside the abstraction of mathematics. In this way, these activities will be manipulative and will make it explicit how mathematical processes work.

At this point, teachers may wonder how these demonstrations should be designed. From tekman Education, an expert publisher in mathematics didactics, they recommend that the teaching of this subject should follow the three principles that mark the didactics of mathematics.

First of all, it is important to go from the simple to the complex. This allows students to develop a solid understanding of the concepts and procedures. Second, it is necessary to relate the knowledge of the mathematical senses to each other, which will help students find patterns and develop mathematical skills. Finally, it is essential to know what knowledge is prerequisite for the construction of other knowledge, achieving a deeper and more significant learning.

In ONMAT, the secondary mathematics program developed by tekman Education, teachers have access to different mathematical demonstrations that comply with these didactic principles. These demonstrations are different according to the secondary course, adapting the activities to the curriculum.

The ONMAT secondary mathematics program has been designed by tekman Education with one objective: for adolescent students to connect with mathematics. To do this, tekman is committed to manipulation, contextualized activities, competency assessment, cooperative work and the culture of thought.

To bring mathematics closer to the daily life of students, ONMAT offers contextualized activities that allow them to solve real-life problems and foster their curiosity about this subject. The platform offers teachers a sequenced organization of these contents, structured by trimesters through micro-units.

In the case of mathematical demonstrations, ONMAT allows students to work on mathematical issues and concepts in a more visual way, making the most implicit and abstract explicit. This facilitates the understanding of the concepts while motivating students to be interested in the subject.

At ONMAT all the activities and resources (manipulative demonstrations, theoretical videos, or calculation games, among others) are available within a digital platform. This allows you to project the activities in class, print them or work with individual devices.