PROCEEDINGS OF THE 15TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2012
Portland, Oregon
The Use of Dynamic Visualizations Following Reinvention
Page: 2-385
This research is a part of a larger project to gain insights into how calculus students might come to understand formal limit definitions. For this study, a pair of students participated in an eight- day guided reinvention teaching experiment in which they created a formal definition for sequence convergence even though they had not previously received instruction on formal limit definitions. During the reinvention process they identified and coordinated relevant graphical attributes of sequences as they recognized and resolved problems with their emerging definition. For this paper, we detail the ninth day in which the students participated in an activity using The Geometer’s Sketchpad where they had to interpret their understandings of sequence convergence on premade manipulate-able dynamic visualizations of sequences. We hypothesize that by using these dynamic visualizations, the definition and their resolutions to problems were reinforced by strengthening their connections between their definition and these visual representations.