Media and milieus for complex numbers: An experiment with Maple based text

International audienceBased on the notion of institutionally conditioned relationship to an organisation of knowledge and practice, we present our first design and implementation of a self-study module on complex numbers in an introductory mathematics course for non-mathematics majors. The basic idea is to develop an " interactive text " in the computer algebra system " Maple " , designed to create a reasonably self-sustaining dialectics of media and milieus for students to learn about and work with complex numbers. We discuss some of the obstacles and constraints met in a first implementation of such a text, as well as hypothesis for future implementations