Pixel International Conferences

The Instituto Federal do Rio de Janeiro, campus Duque de Caxias, has a technical course in chemistry, that enroll students at fourteen until eighteen years old.  This course is integrated with the minimun curriculum at High School in Brazil and has a duration of three and a half years  In this sense, the students study mathematics during three years due to the minimum curriculum in High School.  Despite of the technical course in chemistry requires some habilities and competences in mathematics, some students do not note this necessity.  As a consequence, they do not have interesting in mathematics and believe that this subject is present in the technical course in chemistry only due to the minimun curriculum.

However, the chemical teachers recognize the difficulties presented by the students during the chemistry classes due to problems in basic mathematics.  Thus, the mathematical teacher has two roles in the technical course of chemistry:  develop the minimum curriculum topics in mathematics and collaborate with the chemical teachers with respect the habilities and competencies for the chemistry classes. 

This work developed an experimental methodology for mathematics classes, including the minimum curriculum topics with chemical problems that would be studied by students in the chemistry classes later.  At the end of the process, we observe improvement in the interest of the students in the mathematics classes, in addtion to better results also in math assessments.  We concluded that the connection between mathematics and chemistry in the mathematics classes modified the teaching learning process for both mathematics and chemistry, being an excellent experience for the students and teachers involved in the project.

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