Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: SUZY KELLY DA SILVA

GAMES IN ALGEBRA TEACHING: AN EXPERIENCE IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

Teaching Algebra. Elementary Education, Using Games. Activity Notebook.

This work is the result of research developed during the master's degree in the area of Teaching Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. The focus of the work was: how can the use of games in teaching algebra in elementary school classes impact mathematics classes? To respond, we developed an educational product in the form of an activity book based on games aimed at teaching first degree equations. The choice of this topic was due to this researcher's professional concern, but also because it is a subject that several studies present as being highly difficult among elementary school students, sometimes creating barriers to learning new content. Our games were designed based on the difficulties indicated in the literature for teaching this topic, that is: poor understanding of the idea of unknown, the transition from usual language to algebraic in mathematics problems, meanings for the and of the equal sign. We applied the activities to three regular classes in the ninth year of Elementary School in a school located in the city of Vera Cruz/RN to analyze the potential of this sequence of games. The application was carried out by the class teacher and monitored by the author of this work. In addition to the observation of classes that allowed the creation of a field diary, letters written by students participating in the research were found that reported the development of activities and their perceptions about them, and we also observed the responses to the activities given by the students. Data analysis revealed that the use of games can provide meaningful teaching, but that it is well planned. The data also reveal that excessive application can be a negative point for conducting classes when using games as a teaching strategy and, furthermore, we saw that this strategy can overcome barriers such as that “mathematics is extremely learning difficulty” as it provided the development of self-confidence in students, leading to restraint in discipline.