Instrumentation in Mathematics Education

Abstract

In order to define instrumentation in the context of mathematics education, it is necessary to define instruments: at this stage of this article, we do not differentiate between instruments and artifacts, i.e., we regard them as things that are created and used by humans to help, assist, support, enlarge, and empower their activity. Instrumentation is the action to give someone an instrument, or the process by which someone acquires an instrument, in order to perform a given activity. The notion of instrumentation is part of a network of concepts; we will focus here on the main dialectical relationships between them.