Didactic Design of Computer-based Learning Environments

Abstract

Many educators hope that the thoughtful use of computers in the mathematics classroom will help enhance students’ understanding of mathematics. But, as has been well expressed by Schoenfeld (1990): “Understanding… means having a great deal of prerequisite knowledge at one’s fingertips; it means having multiple perspectives on the objects involved…; it means having multiple representations for them, and coordinated means of moving among the perspectives and representations. And it means having all this knowledge organized in ways that derive power from redundancy… “(p. 4). In other words, understanding is an extremely complex affair, and didactic, cognitive, epistemological and mathematical considerations all intervene and interact in determining the processes leading to understanding. If students are to derive understanding from the use of educational software, these same considerations must interactively enter the design and development process of the software. The manner in which this happens and the possible contribution of teachers to this process merit explicit attention and analysis, and will be the main focus of this chapter. It is to be hoped that such analysis will contribute to improving the quality of the design process and of the resulting software.