constructivism, teaching of mathematics, scheme-oriented education, teaching of combinatorics

This study stems from the on-going discussion about the quality of teaching of mathematics. The main shortcoming lies in the fact that the education is focused on reproduction and imitation in combination with low representation of creative activities of pupils in the class. In 2014 an experiment was conducted with pupils on the second stage of elementary school during which the pupils solved tasks from combinatorics. The teacher tried to follow the scheme-oriented education method. The pupils focused on easier combinatoric tasks, closer to their current skill levels. For the whole duration of the class, the teacher tried to leave the discovery of all solutions to these tasks to the pupils and only entered the discussion as a moderator.Pupils enjoyed this form of mathematical education much more. They were able to deduce not only generic procedural models of situations, but also abstract knowledge that is usually discovered only in later stages of education.