Promoting a meaningful learning of double integrals through routes of digital tasks

Within a wider project aimed at innovating the teaching of mathematics for freshmen, in this study we describe the design and the implementation of two routes of digital tasks aimed at fostering students’ approach to double integrals. The tasks are built on a formative assessment frame and classical works on problem solving. They provide facilitative and response-specific feedback and the possibility to request differ- ent hints. In this way, students may be guided to the development of well-connected knowledge, operative and decision-making skills. We investigated the effects of the inter- action with the digital tasks on the learning of engineering freshmen, by comparing the behaviours of students who worked with the digital tasks (experimental group, N=19) and students who did not (control group, N=19). We detected that students in the ex- perimental group showed more flexibility of thinking and obtained better results in the final exam than students in the control group. The results confirmed the effectiveness of the experimental educational path and offered us interesting indications for further studies.