Tangram tasks for pre-service teachers

José Manuel Diego Mantecón, Universidad de Cantabria, Spain

The AuthoMath Project allows us to use GeoGebra applets on STACK. This offers a wide range of tasks that we can create and provide feedback to. Students have the chance to work in an interactive environment and use different tecniques to solve the same task.

There are many ways to compute the area and the perimeter of a figure. In this task, we go through a few of them using Tangram pieces that our pre-service teachers can move around and rotate. They can use this applet to make the calculations using different units of measurement.

Using Tangram pieces
Figure: Illustrating using Tangram pieces within a response.

In this task we ask them to compute and compare the area and the perimeter of two figures, but also to reflect on what they are doing as a way to teach these concepts to primary school students. Mathematical concepts go hand in hand with didactical notions.

Using Tangram pieces, with feedback
Figure: Measuring areas with Tangram pieces.