Educators often argue that students should engage in activities such as conjecturing, proving, and deductive reasoning. The underlying principle is that learning mathematics means doing as mathematicians do. However, "mathematician" implicitly refers to a pure mathematician at university. "The aim of our paper is to critically…

In response to the challenge of geometry's abstract and less engaging nature for students, this study explored the potential of connecting geometry to cultural elements, specifically geometric ornaments found in various cultures worldwide. Geometric ornaments, laden with cultural and spiritual significance, serve as a bridge between mathematics…

Understanding exponential growth is a fundamental aspect of developing critical numeracy skills; however, typically, exponential growth is introduced in curricular documents to secondary students. Moreover, such introductions tend to be in the context of formal mathematical modeling, divorced from a sense of quantity. The authors argue that, given…

Attention to the disconnection between culture and mathematics has been addressed then and now (Wilder (in: Graves et al., Proceedings of the international congress of mathematicians, American Mathematical Society, 1950; Liu in Taiwan Journal of Mathematics Education, 8:79-88, 2021b). Recently, studies, workshops, and contests about an approach to…

This is the second of two articles on the life and mathematical legacy of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, who died one hundred years ago. The first article, "The Life and Times of the Indian Mathematician Ramanujan (1887-1920)" (EJ1269466), which appeared in the previous issue of "Australian Mathematics Education Journal,"…

If the goal is to move beyond the shape of the graph to consider the dynamic aspects of functions, students need to explore dynamic representations of functions. To address this, the authors combined the use of a dynamic representation of function with the instructional routine, Which One Doesn't Belong? [WODB]. In this article, they briefly…

Despite the function concept being fundamental to mathematics, an adequate understanding of this concept is often lacking. This problem is prevalent at all levels of education and is reported in many countries. This article reports on a new pedagogical strategy based on exploring photographs or digital images as functions. The objective of this…

An important issue in mathematics education in many countries has long been how to make use of students' daily life mathematics (informal mathematics) in teaching mathematics at school (formal mathematics). This communication proposes an alternative framework of mathematics education that bridges informal and formal mathematics using…

We discuss how mathematics and secondary mathematics education majors developed an understanding of Fermat points for the triangle as well as Steiner points for the square and regular pentagon, and also of soap film configurations between parallel plates where forces are in equilibrium. The activities included the use of soap films and the…

The objective of this research is to study the "Scratch" programming language as a didactic tool to teach functions. The introduction of didactic tools allowing comprehension in simple and attractive ways is required. Given the traditional teaching/learning system, it is necessary to organize participatory and collaborative dynamic…

We report our findings and perspective to document the knowledge exhibited by three experienced high school teachers in their instructional decisions for lessons on the equation of an exponential function. We describe the nature of the mathematical ideas and connections teachers promoted in discourse and the decisions that supported the emergence…

Implementing inquiry-based modules within a course can be effective and enable instructor experimentation, without completely transforming an entire course. For instructors new to inquiry-based learning (IBL), we state hallmarks of the practice and point out the merits of strong IBL communities. An inquiry-based approach may alleviate some current…

In this work, we study the mathematical practice of defining by mathematics researchers. Since research is an important part of many professional mathematicians, understanding how they do research is a necessary step before thinking about future researchers' undergraduate and postgraduate education. We focus on the defining process associated with…

This paper aims to investigate the following question: How do students use mathematics in modeling activities? With this purpose, the paper reports on mathematization and use of mathematics, and deals with empirical data with focus on modeling activities performed by students in the first year and in the fourth year of a degree in mathematics.…

Mathematics textbooks play a very important role in mathematics education and textbook tasks are used by students for practice to a large extent. Since the nature of the tasks may influence the way students think it is important that the textbooks provide a balance of a variety of tasks. The analyses of the requirements in textbook tasks contain…