Engineering students' use of scaffolding elements within digital tasks concerning planar integration domains

In this paper, we focus on a sequence of digital tasks involving the representation of subsets of the plane as normal domains. We investigate the role of scaffolding elements provided to supports Engineering students' activities with the tasks. The study focuses on 63 volunteer Engineering freshman. Using qualitative methods, we carried on the combined analysis of video recordings of the students' interaction with the tasks in small groups and their individual answers to a survey after the activity. The main result of the data analysis is the identification of three categories of students' behaviours concerning their use of the provided scaffolding elements. These categories reflect different ways of grasping the scaffolding, purposes and levels of awareness by the students.