abstract
- © 2020 Centro de Informacion Tecnologica.A learning activity was designed for the topic functions and derivatives contextualized in the themes of corruption and water pollution, which was contrasted against a traditional activity. This was done as a tool to promote interest and usefulness sense of mathematics in first-year social science undergraduate students. The students who participated in the activity had an incipient perceived usefulness of mathematics and their interest was focused on social, economic and environmental issues. It was concluded that the context provoked a better performance of the students in those questions related to interpretation of concepts, while it did not show significant benefits in those that required the repetition of an algorithm. Finally, the students perceived the contextualized activity with greater pleasure, interest and usefulness sense over the traditional one, improving to a greater extent their mathematical competence.