Aplicações da Criptografia no Ensino da Matemática

Abstract

One of the school education’s greatest challenges is producing contents that reflect the scientific and technological development of society, especially in mathematics, which is seen by the students as an abstract and a decontextualized discipline. For this reason, this research’s main objective was to analyse the teaching and learning process when introducing cryptography in the mathematics classes. So, this paper’s specific objectives were: to analyse cryptography’s historical development, to identify the relashionship between mathematics and cryptography, to explore activities directed for high school students to create a minicourse and to analyse critically the obtained results based on a meaningful and a contextualized approach for teaching mathematics. In order to achieve these goals, the methodology, which has an qualitative approach, was developed in three steps. The first step was planning the minicourse to be applied with the Instituto Federal do Piauí - Campus Cocal students based on past researches about the theme. The second step consisted on the development of the activities to be executed on the minicourse taking into consideration the target public. Finally, it was made the posterior anylisis of the results obtained with the minicourse execution with eleven High School studentes that wanted to participate in the activity. As a result, the minicourse application made possible the prodution of contextualized activities for the development of digital literacy in society. In conclusion, the researcher noticed an greater engagement and interest in the developed activities by the students and significant contributions for teacher’s formation