Dolores Carrillo-Gallego

The International Commission for the Study and Improvement of Mathematical Education (1950) was interested in updating and developing teaching resources to address the pedagogical problems of mathematics teaching in the mid-1950s. As a result of this concern, the First International Exhibition of Mathematical Teaching Material was held in Spain in 1957, an event that had great international repercussions. This work is situated in the field of the history of mathematics education, so the research method used is historical. The aim is to study those mathematical didactic models which, due to their dynamic and multipurpose nature, stood out at the Exhibition. The results show that these materials contributed favorably to the teaching of mathematics, as they made it possible to work on a wide variety of topics and provided numerous advantages over traditional material. The use of these models meant that the mathematical notions or ideas generally arose from the action that the child carried out with the material; they also made the student the main protagonist of their learning.