Designing an ACE Approach for Teaching the Polar Coordinates

Vahid Borji^1, and Michael. Gr. Voskoglou²

¹Department of Mathematics, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran

²Mathematical Sciences, School of Technological Applications, Graduate Technological Educational Institute of Western Greece, Patras, Greece

Cite this paper:
Vahid Borji and Michael. Gr. Voskoglou. Designing an ACE Approach for Teaching the Polar Coordinates. American Journal of Educational Research. 2017; 5(3):303-309. doi: 10.12691/education-5-3-11

Abstract

This paper continues a research started in an earlier work on teaching/learning the polar coordinates in the plane with the APOS/ACE instructional treatment of mathematics. Based on the Genetic Decomposition developed in our previous work, we design here an ACE circle and we apply it for teaching/learning the polar coordinates to a group of students of an Iranian university. For testing the effectiveness of this application the results of the experimental group are compared to those of a control group, for which the polar coordinates were taught at the same semester in the traditional, lecture-based way. The conclusions drawn enable us to make some minor revisions to the initial design of our Genetic Decomposition.

Keywords:
Cartesian and Polar Coordinates (PCO) and Curves APOS Theory Genetic Decomposition (GD) ACE Circle Mathematics Teaching

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