2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This article presents a study whose objective is to analyze the impact of the mobile application "Aplic Triang" to learn the topic of "Applications of Right Triangles" in high school students.

There is a lack of motivation in students to practice mathematics. However, several studies state that there is a positive impact after the use of mobile applications on their performance, motivation and learning attitudes.

Consequently, we looked for an app that could help students practice this specific topic, but we couldn’t find any.
So, the authors of this article worked on the design and development of the Aplic Triang mobile application. This application has 25 types of exercises, where each one has variables that are randomly calculated by the app, so the application always shows different exercises.

This research has been carried out in a private high school, during the spring semester of 2022.

In the previous year, the Aplic Triang mobile application was used for the first time in an experimental group consisting of three groups of the same teacher and compared it with a control group consisting of three groups of other teachers, finding a significant difference in the time a student takes to solve an exercise.

Therefore, in the spring of 2022, the Aplic Triang mobile application was used again with the aim of demonstrating that the significant difference in the reduction of time was not related to the expertise of the teacher who implemented it, but to the use of the tool. So, this time, the design adopted for this research is quasi-experimental with a quantitative approach, with an experimental group (EG) and two control groups (CGs) carrying out a post-test.
The EG (Group 1) had 25 students taught by teacher A and the two CGs with 22 (Group2) and 26 students (Group3). The first CG (Group 2) was taught by teacher A and the second CG (Group 3) was taught by teacher B.

The application was used by students to solve exercises in only one class session. Approximately 10 days after the practice session, an exam was applied, whose results were analyzed, measuring the impact of the use of the application on the student performance.

A one-way ANOVA test was performed to compare the average time it takes for a student to solve two exercises. The results of EG and CGs were compared in pairs, finding that there is a significant difference between the means of the EG and the CGs, but there is no difference between the two CGs.

Our results indicate that there is a significant difference in the time that students spend when solving problems with and without the use of the "Aplic Triang" application, regardless of the teacher. Students who practiced with the app had a significant decrease in their solution time. It can thus be concluded that the use of the application is the determining factor and not the teacher.