taken into account. The analysis that the students carried out with the data obtained in EXCEL
was made from the calculation of the average rate of the function, as shown in the following
dialogues:
Iris:
It increases, but is diminishing because in the last interval of 100 meters it increases
10.Why does it decrease?
Alexis: Listen, if here there are 10 and then if we add from 400 to 500 it is 9. But why?
Wouldn’t you think that from a higher point the distance of visibility would be
greater?
After exploring again the table and the graph elaborated in Excel they concluded that the
distance of visibility increases with the increase in height but the function does not follow a linear
behavior.
Conclusions
An important research question in this study was “What is the instrumentation process
followed by students to incorporate a technological tool in their problem solving approaches?”
Results in this study indicate that students’ first approaches to the task, based on paper and pencil
work, involved the use of isolated knowledge and basically focused their attention to the
calculations required in the problem; however, the use of the tool, later, helped them analyze the
problem globally and recognize that the behavior of the representative function was different
from what they had assumed initially. In this process, it was evident that students went through a
cognitive reorganization in which the use of the tool played a fundamental role to not only to
visualize the problem as a whole, but also to analyze the same task from diverse perspectives
including the examination o cases not included in the statement of the task.
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Convention