Designing an ACE Approach for Teaching the Polar Coordinates

This paper continues a research started in an earlier work on teaching/learning the polar coordinates in the plane with the APOS/ACE instructional treatment of mathematics. Based on the Genetic Decomposition developed in our previous work, we design here an ACE circle and we apply it for teaching/learning the polar coordinates to a group of students of an Iranian university. For testing the effectiveness of this application the results of the experimental group are compared to those of a control group, for which the polar coordinates were taught at the same semester in the traditional, lecture-based way. The conclusions drawn enable us to make some minor revisions to the initial design of our Genetic Decomposition.