Crop circles

Abstract

Mathematics nourishes the critical and democratic essence at the foundation of conscious citizenship. For this purpose, contextualization is a resource for building a positive attitude from the students’ point of view. The concurrency of mathematics with other active skills is an educational necessity to achieve the targets of the curriculum and to mobilize different skills to be able to give a personalized assessment.
In classroom practice, this approach allows to overcome the repetition of stereotyped exercises. At the same time, mobilizing more skills, gives the chance to involve the whole class in the educational dialogue enhancing every contribution.
The idea experimented with the students, within the didactic unit dedicated to the circle and circumference, was inspired by a famous crop circles hoax of the seventies. The activity ended with a creative challenge: the drawing of a crop circle. In addition to requiring the measurement of the parts of the disk, the activity involved the design of real operating instructions to create a crop circle.