Application of mathematics in the teaching of physics. Case the slope of the straight line

Abstract

In our country, one of the challenges that teachers in basic and secondary education must take on is the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge, that is to say, to promote in students the recognition of a curriculum that should not work in isolation. On the contrary, the implementation of diverse pedagogical resources that promote the complementarity of knowledge is suggested, since in those experiences that have been documented, they have shown better academic performance. This research reports an example of the application of a basic concept of the mathematics curriculum as a tool in the solution of physics situations, with the aim of enhancing the understanding of the relationships between variables, as occurs with the graphs of kinematics. The questionnaire designed for this research is filled in by a group of eleventh grade students from a private educational institution. It consists of three situations proposed to respond to three open questions with argued answers. It is highlighted as findings that a group of students is located in a basic level of interpretation of the graphs whose activity focuses on making a description of what happens in each interval of the trajectory, followed by a small group that exhibited the ability to associate the concept of the slope of the line with the concepts of velocity or acceleration as a function of the variables given in the graph, basing their argumentation on very intuitive concepts but without mathematical support.