The concept of"infinite" through representation: a didactic interdisciplinar experience.

This paper outlines a didactic project conceived for junior high school students. This project was devised during a teaching graduation school as the final thesis and was tried out in a public Italian school throughout the integrated teaching training. A series of didactic experiences were so tested during all over one year in a class in order to verify the applicability of the project. The methods used were lessons, quotations, discussions, experiments, PC activities and research home works. In an interdisciplinar outlook the teacher involved literary texts, mathematical and geometrical problems, images from nature and art world. The main issue of this path was in fact focusing the students’ attention on the idea of infinite by catching their interest with questions, solutions, expression that this issue exposes. The interpretation of the concept of infinite, given by geometry and representation, could offer the students an opportunity to train their mind and sensibility to think in an abstract way. This is in fact the main step in the progress of learning psychological structures during the first teens. The structure of this process was based on a constructivist assumption that led them into a “step by step” re-discovering of the historical development of geometry in a parallel with their own experience.