Learning Area of Planes through Playing Puzzle

Written by: Evangelista Lus Windyana Palupi

International Master Program on Mathematics Education (IMPoME 2011)

Evangelista.palupi@yahoo.com

 

A.    Introduction

Mathematics is often seen as a difficult and uninteresting subject to learn by students. Students often face difficulties in learning mathematics. For example, a teacher in Grade 6 in where this design will be implemented, ever said that her students have a difficulties to divide a n-side irregular plane into some another planes like triangle, square, rectangle, and so on.

To make a students understand and interested in mathematics then teacher should engage them into the teaching and learning process itself. This means that teacher should not only deliver the knowledge directly but also have to involved students in learning and teaching process. Not only that, teacher should transfer the knowledge in such meaningful way which connected the lesson with the students ‘real’ word which ever be experienced by students, so that students will be able to catch up and understand the subject/lesson. Those things can be done by help of Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) approach.

Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) approach not only focuses on the formal or abstract knowledge, but it is started from the ‘real’ (something near and have been experienced by students) to the abstract/formal one). And to bridge that, there is a use of manipulative in RME. Furthermore, RME give a chance to contribute and involved in teaching and learning process.

Puzzle is an ordinary game which is gets used to be played by children. An irregular n-sides plane can be built by some pieces/ kinds of other planes. Due of that, in this occasion, my friend (Elika Kurniadi) and I designed an instructional plan using RME approach to teach the area of irregular n-sides planes through playing puzzle for preliminary students Grade 6. This instructional design is also implemented in the Grade 6 of Pusri elementary school, Palembang.

The aim of the designing instructional plan is to give a teacher a source of instructional design based on RME approach to teach area of irregular n-sides planes in Grade 6. While the aim of its implementation is to know whether this design can be implemented or not by teacher and to know students’ thinking/reasoning in solving problem and in doing activity which is given in the teaching and learning process using the designed instructional plan. Further, it will be described about designing process in ‘design research’ which includes preliminary design, teaching experiment and retrospective analysis.

(Read more: download through this link Learning Area of Planes through Playing Puzzle)