Aplicação de uma atividade experimental sobre vazão de líquidos para o estudo de funções no ensino médio

Abstract

Considering the school context from the practical point of view, functions serve as instruments for the study of phenomena and allow the construction of experimental models that can be described through numerical, algebraic, tables, graphical representations, among others. The purpose of this work is to construct a didactic sequence that focuses these representations in a more articulated way, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the content by the student. Aiming at overcoming the limitations of contextualized situations involving functions, a didactic sequence was proposed based on an experiment that would allow students to formalize and explore the concept of function and to identify their different representations and applications. This proposal had as methodological approach the Mathematical Modeling, whose guidelines make possible the study, the research and the problematization of a real situation. With the data obtained from the experiment, the students composed a table in order to convert this data into a dot chart in the Cartesian plane. From this graph a function was constructed to model the phenomenon observed. All the proposed tasks were described in detail in Activity Sheets, which form the basis for the purpose of this work. In total, twelve separate Activity Sheets were prepared in five blocks, including the last block that includes a final evaluation with questions about flow and construction of graphs. With the conclusion of the application and analysis of the results, we verified that the pedagogical proposal reached the desired goals, stimulating and encouraging students' participation in the development of their autonomy and their mathematical knowledge, contributing decisively to the understanding of the meaning of the concept of function.