The research of teaching translation which is one of the concept of transformations geometry in computer assisted environment for primary sixth class students

The purpose of this study was to explore how elementary school students understand and conceptually develop the meaning of translations ? a topic that has been added to the National Curriculum Standards recently. In order to teach this concept, a technology-intensive curricular piece (with use of Wingeom-tr) was developed and applied to four sixth graders through a teaching experiment. Throughout the study, the focus was on how participants understood and conceptualize the necessary constructs for understanding translations and an analysis was provided. The data gathered from the 4-hour teaching sessions with each participant, and individual pre- and post-interviews were analyzed using qualitative research analyses techniques. The focus of such analyses was on students? treatment of translations and related constructs as drawing (operating from what was available on screen) or as figure (operating from the mathematics of what was seen on screen). As a result, the curricular piece that was designed by taking into account the main tenets of constructivism (e.g., assimilation, etc.) seemed to help the participants reflectively abstract translations. In addition, it was found that use of technology played an important and effective role in moving thinking from drawing to figure while learning translations. In such movement, it was realized that conceptualizing vectors was a key.