GEOGEBRA-BASED ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING NUMERICAL ITERATIVE METHODS OF NONLINEAR EQUATIONS

This paper is devoted to exemplify the potential holding by GeoGebra as a didactic resource for teaching Mathematics not only in the High School but even in the University. More concretely, our main goal is putting forward how to use GeoGebra as a useful working tool in our classrooms so that our students handle several numerical iterative methods to solve nonlinear equations. Interactive Geometry Software makes possible to deal with these methods starting from their geometrical interpretation and visualize their behaviour and procedure. Visualization is essential for first-year students in the University because they must change their perception about Mathematics and start considering a completely formal and argued way to work the notions, methods and problems explained and posed. Regarding this, we present here some applets we have developed using GeoGebra to carry out our teaching tasks when explaining numerical iterative methods for nonlinear equations. Moreover, we indicate how these applets are applied to our teaching. Specifically, the methods to be dealt with this paper are those with an important geometric interpretation: the bisection method, the secant one, the regula-falsi or false-position one and the tangent or Newton-Raphson one (as example of fixed-point methods).