Use of conceptual blending to investigate students approaching functions in an emerging embodied technology.

When emerging technologies meet embodied activities, new mathematical learning opportunities arise together with new questions about underlying conceptualization processes. In this paper, we present the results of a study involving secondary school students developed upon the use of an emerging embodied technology, GeoGebra plus. To analyse the students’ cognitive processes, we used conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner) and we built a model to describe the complexity of integrating embodiment, a new technology and mathematics. In this paper we show that GeoGebra plus can support the object-oriented and dynamic view of functions. Moreover, we suggest that such technologies are the engine to move from the paradigm of ‘humans-with-media’, introduced by Borba and Villarreal, towards a ‘humans-in-media’ one.