The effect of engineering design based mathematics activities on academic achievements and attitudes of middle school students

Teaching mathematics in the classroom requires creating opportunities for children to learn mathematics, providing a supportive learning environment, nurturing processes and strategies that promote learning. One of these opportunities can be provided by the engineering design cycle. Despite the increase in research showing how engineering can play a role in connecting science, technology and mathematics disciplines, mathematics has remained in the background compared to other disciplines. From this point of view, in this study, it was aimed at determining the effect of Engineering Design Based Mathematics Activities on middle school students' mathematics achievement, attitudes towards mathematics and views about Engineering Design Based Mathematics Activities application. The research design is a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design with paired control group. The quantitative data of the research were supported by qualitative data. The participants of the study contained seventh grade students studying at a secondary school in Tokat. The data of the study were collected with Academic Achievement Test, view form, Attitude Scale towards Mathematics, observation and video recording. Within the scope of the research, three Engineering Design Based Mathematics Activities were designed and applied to the experimental group. The results showed that the application had a positive effect on the academic achievement of the students. However, no significant difference was found between the students' attitude scores towards mathematics. In addition, it was concluded that the students mostly found the application to have a positive effect on their views on the Mathematics lesson and that they found the application entertaining, amusing and intriguing.