Abstract: | The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) in its Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics encourages a middle school curriculum that integrates technology. It recommends that students should be able to identify and use functional relationships and make connections among seemingly diverse concepts and topics. In this activity of exploring the derivation of Pi, students take a constructivist role by collecting data and making conjectures. Using the data they construct graphs and tables and discourse about appropriate algebraic representations. The computer is used as an instructional aid enabling the students to view the data in a variety of forms. They are encouraged to communicate about the connections among the various representations. |