Teaching numeral systems based on history in high school

Abstract

In the first decade after the turn of the millennium, previous doubts about the inclusion of the history of mathematics in education also received more attention. Several researchers point to the difficulties of teachers enthusiastic on the topic, to the research methodological difficulties of such studies, and the need to increase the number of empirical researches. In addition to increasing the amount of such empirical evidence, this paper seeks to contribute to the continuously developing answers to the basic questions (what and how?) of integrating the history of mathematics into public education in the recent decades by presenting a given topic, the teaching of numeral systems based on history, and the results of the related surveys. In the course of our research, we examined the question of whether the use of the history of mathematics as a tool, as opposed to teaching by focusing solely on routine tasks, helps to fix the curriculum into the long-term memory.