Math Learning in a Science Museum—Proposal for a Workshop Design Based on STEAM Strategy to Learn Mathematics. The Case of the Cryptography Workshop

In mathematics teaching, great efforts are made, and diverse teaching strategies are employed in order to facilitate students’ learning process. Informal environments have proven to be conducive and motivating spaces for science learning. In particular, science museums can be used as a complement and collaborate in order to leverage each of their strengths to motivate mathematics learning. Educational models give a global explanation to the learning process. Taking into account all these aspects and considering van Hiele’s model as didactic reference, we propose the design of a general workshop that has among its objectives the learning of mathematics. To do this, we start from the three main elements and processes set forth in van Hiele’s model: insight, reasoning levels and learning phases. The insight or student’s competence are formulated through Hoffer’s abilities, and for the development of the activities of the learning phases, the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and maths) strategy. Once the general proposal has been made, we use it to design a scientific workshop for learning mathematics about cryptography. Our greatest challenge was in generating activities adapted to the established requirements. It would be interesting, for future works, to design research to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposal presented. Moreover, it would be interesting to develop a proposal for assessing student learning.