Applications of Tulip Motif in Turkish Art with Geometer’s Sketchpad Program

In the 21st century we live in, technology is developing rapidly. Inevitably, the technologies used in almost every area of daily life will also reflect in the field of education. Educational technologies, which enable students to grasp abstract concepts more easily and facilitate the teaching process for teachers, have increased their impact in schools. The effects of dynamic geometry software on course success, attractiveness, and concretization in mind have been the subject of different studies. Dynamic geometry software that can visualize algebraic expressions with graphics creates an interdisciplinary working environment with its drawing features. Thanks to Geometer’s Sketchpad (GSP), one of this software, students can dynamically create very different patterns and shapes. Students can realize higher-level cognitive learning thanks to the relationships and inferences they make on these shapes. These and similar patterns that emerged thanks to GSP can increase students’ awareness in different fields by combining different disciplines such as history, mathematics and art. In this study, the drawing stages of the tulip motif, which we come across in important architectural works in the Ottoman and Anatolian Seljuk history, which have been the subject of ornament art, are shown via GSP using both the transformation geometry and functions.

Prospective teachers constructing dynamic geometry activities for gifted pupils: Connections between the frameworks of Krutetskii and van Hiele

The Swedish educational system has, so far, accorded little attention to the development of gifted pupils. Moreover, up to date, no Swedish studies have investigated teacher education from the perspective of mathematically gifted pupils. Our study is based on an instructional intervention, aimed to introduce the notion of giftedness in mathematics and to prepare prospective teachers (PTs) for the needs of the gifted. The data consists of 10 dynamic geometry software activities, constructed by 24 PTs. We investigated the constructed activities for their qualitative aspects, according to two frameworks: Krutetskii’s framework for mathematical giftedness and van Hiele’s model of geometrical thinking. The results indicate that nine of the 10 activities have the potential to address pivotal abilities of mathematically gifted pupils. In another aspect, the analysis suggests that Krutetskii’s holistic description of mathematical giftedness does not strictly correspond with the discrete levels of geometrical thinking proposed by van Hiele.

An instrumental orchestration for online course at the university level

In this article, we present a proposal for instrumental orchestration that organizes the use of technological environments in online mathematics education, in the synchronous mode for the concepts of eigenvalue and eigenvector of a first linear algebra course with engineering students. We used the instrumental orchestration approach as a theoretical framework to plan and organize the artefacts involved in the environment (didactic configuration) and the ways in which they are implemented (exploitation modes). The activities were designed using interactive virtual didactic scenarios, in a dynamic geometry environment, guided exploration worksheets with video and audio recordings of the work of the students, individually or in pairs. The results obtained are presented and the orchestrations of a pedagogical sequence to introduce the concepts of eigenvalue and eigenvector are briefly discussed. This work allowed us to identify new instrumental orchestrations for online mathematics education.

Dealing with Degeneracies in Automated Theorem Proving in Geometry

We report, through different examples, the current development in GeoGebra, a widespread Dynamic Geometry software, of geometric automated reasoning tools by means of computational algebraic geometry algorithms. Then we introduce and analyze the case of the degeneracy conditions that so often arise in the automated deduction in geometry context, proposing two different ways for dealing with them. One is working with the saturation of the hypotheses ideal with respect to the ring of geometrically independent variables, as a way to globally handle the statement over all non-degenerate components. The second is considering the reformulation of the given hypotheses ideal—considering the independent variables as invertible parameters—and developing and exploiting the specific properties of this zero-dimensional case to analyze individually the truth of the statement over the different non-degenerate components.