Meaningful learning and new technologies: e-learning and mathematical surfaces

E-learning is undoubtedly a unique and exciting opportunity for interaction between the traditional teaching-methodological framework and the new technologies. It gives the opportunity for each student to build their own personal path of interpretation and ease the reticulated structure of knowledge. The learning process assumes, in this way, a fundamental creative-ideational dimension. Multimedia and interactivity have, in fact, reason to exist and meaning in the cortical structure and in the reticular human thought. The media ducation (and e-learning in particular) lies then in a scenario in which human relationships and communication at all levels are no arbitrary situations, assigned to the case or necessarily sought, but constructed and deconstructed by the technology and who governs them. Based on these theoretical assumptions in this paper we present the idea of implementing a course (in 3D) on geometric surfaces structured as a path in a virtual context, in a landscape composed of surfaces, illustrative panels, formulas, descriptions, which includes the commonly studied in schools solids and the lesser-known regular star polyhedra. From their personal observation on surfaces constructed in a three-dimensional virtual environment students go back to the classical concepts of solid geometry and plane geometry. The learner is almost free to choose his own path, based on the various alternatives that will have. he may ask some questions and try to find the answer. he can choose to reflect more or less on some object. The approach can be informal but also more formal: he may for example choose to start from the panels in which is described the equation or by the observation of the surface