The Ideas of mathematics teacher candidates and mathematics teachers related of teaching mathematics with mathematical game and activities in high school level

ABSTRACT Işıkhan U?UREL From the very beginning of his existence, humankind has had an obvious effort to explore universe and its secrets to be able to control it. Human beings, with their never- ending curiosity and desire to search, have managed to discover a way of systematizing their knowledge not only to transfer them to future generations but also not to face the same hardships in their new learning attempts. The systematization of knowledge has enabled discussions and comments upon them.Human beings, who have been looking for certainty at a point that seems to be not satisfying, have led to the birth of mathematics, which is considered to be the queen of science. Thus, a breathtaking adventure in this field has taken its start. Mathematics, which has realized its dynamism through only the effort of mind, has affected science and technology considerably from its birth to our modern day. Today with its more than sixty sub-branches mathematics is thought to be an invaluable resource for all the fields of science. Being so important, it has also led to the birth of the domain of teaching mathematics. It is a feet that a great number of studies are being carried out in that domain each passing day. Evidently, the only purpose of these studies is to enable the actualisation of mathematics education in an efficient way. What is aimed in that study, which attemts to contribute even a little bit to these studies mentioned above, is depicting mathematics teachers' and candidates' opinions about the role of games and activities in teaching mathematics. This study has been performed in D.E.Ü., Buca Education Faculty during 2002-2003 education terms. It has been realised by the participation of 226 mathematics teacher candidates and 44 mathematics teachers chosen from the high schools with different socio-economical levels in İzmir. The data has been obtained through a pre-information form, which includes 7 open-ended questions, and a questionnaire consisting of 37 articles. During this process several games and activities have been developed and presented to make participants' opinions more dependable. Alpha reliability coefficient of the questionnaire, which was evaluated using SPSS 10.0 Windows Program, has been determined as 0,85. During the analyses of data, frequency dispersions, t- test, one-sided variation analysis, Scheffe and Tukey tests have been employed. Key Words : Teaching Mathematics, Learning Methods, Game, Activity.