When They Tell You That i^56=1: Affordances of Memes and GeoGebra in Mathematics

This work aims at investigating the educational potentialities of mathematical memes, digital objects belonging to students’ out-of-school culture, in combination with classic educational objects as GeoGebra applets. To pursue our goal, we observed a group of 29 12th-grade students who design, create and interact with mathematical memes and GeoGebra applets on complex numbers, during an experiment carried out in Turin in March 2019. Our analysis follows three students, from the design and production phases to the group discussion and the interviews conducted the following year. Specifically, we looked for changes in students’ praxeologies (following Chevallard’s ATD, 1992, 1999) and we traced them back to ZPD mentors (Vygotsky, 1978; Wood et al., 1976) and micro-level agents (Prodromou et al., 2018). Results show that the social value of mathematical memes promotes the appearance of new micro-level facilitators that enhance the educational potentialities of GeoGebra and contribute to foster changes in students’ praxeologies.