Experiences

Programming to understand

Maria Olivotto

Italy

High Secondary School

Maths

Laboratory

Direct

Solving linear equations, the main difficulty for students is to discuss different kind of solutions, when they have parametric equations. They usually understand without any problem the numeric equations, but when solutions depend on a parameter they often are not able to consider all the chances and treat only a specific case.
To reduce this kind of problem I made them work with spreadsheet software (i.e. Excel, OpenOffice) to implement a file that solves immediately any linear equation when numbers are inserted in the appropriate cells.
The main point the students had to work on was to anticipate any possible data that could be inserted in the cells and make sure the program would give an appropriate answer for any of them.
This meant students had understood all the differences between different cases (determinate, indeterminate, impossible) and what leads to each of them. If some case was not considered in the program I could easily show them that there was a problem in their project inserting specific numbers in the cells.
The experience gave good results, since in the following lessons I found out a remarkable improvement in solving parametric equations.
This kind of experience can be done also for other topics (i.e. Systems of linear equations).