Ábaco: Um instrumento milenar para o ensino da matemática

Abstract

Mathematics marks historical moments of humanity. With the development of this science, several peoples were able to develop and control resources, in the wake of this development, as a great ally, the abacus appears in Mesopotamia around five thousand five hundred A.C. The abacus is a rectangular wooden object with poles in the horizontal position, representing the positions of the decimal places (unit, tens, hundred, thousands, units of thousand, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, units of a million). Thus, the abacus has great possibilities to be applied in elementary school classes and contribute to the teaching of mathematics, awakening in students the ability to understand logical reasoning issues in understanding basic operations. Therefore, the objective of this work is to analyze the potentialities and limitations of the use of abacus in elementary school. For this, a bibliographic research will be carried out – State of the Art Study. From the perspective of the state of the art, a table was elaborated with several articles obtained through the platform (Google Scholar), where a screening of academic collections was carried out based on thematic similarity in various typologies during a ten year temporal analysis. In this context, the chart had the following descriptive sequence: Authorship, Title, Place and Year of Publication, Typology and Key Words. This type of research aims to map and discuss scientific productions, in a time interval and delimited field, which address the subject addressed in the research. According to the main results found in this work, it can be affirmed in several studies that the abacus is extremely important in the mathematical context, which, despite being a very old material and its efficiency for teaching basic operations, is little explored by teachers working with mathematics in elementary school. In addition, the use of the abacus facilitated the understanding of basic operations of addition and subtraction within teaching environments, being a crucial tool for mathematical learning in school environments within early levels of elementary school, which emphasizes its relevance. Other positive results were observed in the example of the stimulus that these activities with the practices of the use of abacus exert on the students, who were very participative during the teacher's execution, when using didactic resources, in particular, manipulated materials such as the abacus, by using didactic resources, in particular, manipulated materials such as the abacus, it is able to present to students many responses to certain properties in mathematics that are, for these students, difficult to assimilate, and thus to make them able to grasp and/or build a certain knowledge. Then it becomes necessary to review their teaching practices so that future teachers can be trained in a mathematical reality that emerges full of challenges and discoveries. Finally, it is concluded that it is of great importance that during mathematics classes teachers realize the need to use pedagogical instruments for the acquisition of the knowledge of their students.