Honors Program
Honors Program: Theses
First Advisor
Michelle Homp
Date of this Version
Spring 3-31-2025
Document Type
Project
Citation
Vance, S. 2025. Navigating Geometry with Interactive Lessons: A Collection of Resources in GeoGebra that Address Frequently Held Misconceptions. Undergraduate Honors Thesis. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Abstract
Nearly every high school student in the United States is required to take a geometry class, and for many, it’s unlike any math class they’ve taken before. Additionally, there are certain topics with which past and present geometry students alike tend to struggle. This project was created to address these issues; my goal is that these materials will help students better understand these topics and clear up their frequently held misconceptions about geometry. This project was supported by interviews I conducted with veteran high school geometry teachers with over 75 years of teaching math between them.
This collection of interactive lessons has been created in GeoGebra, a mathematics software that includes various graphing and computing capabilities and shared community resources. The lessons are arranged in the format of a book within GeoGebra, with each of the eight chapters containing between two and six lessons. Each lesson includes definitions, images, questions, and interactive applets that students can use to explore and better understand certain troublesome topics in geometry. These topics include angle relationships and transversals, triangle congruence properties, and secants and chords within a circle. Additionally, the final two lessons provide a brief exploration of non-Euclidean geometry at an introductory level.
Comments
Here's the link to the lessons I created in GeoGebra, the culmination of work done on this project: https://www.geogebra.org/m/vbrqmbqq
Copyright Sara Vance 2025.