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The genesis of mathematical concepts in the evolutionary line of human thought in the long story and the genesis in individual optics possess evident analogies. Starting from this assumption, we describe an activity presented to 15-year-old students; the aim was to consolidate fundamental concepts of Euclidean geometry related to regular polygons. The experimentation has used a didactic approach based on the historical evolution of the formal definition of regular star polygon through the centuries. The activity and the results obtained in terms of internalization of the concepts in the students are showed.

Viene descritta un'attività laboratoriale svolta nell'ambito del Progetto Lauree Scientifiche, collegata al Bando UMI sul Premio Archimede.

In 1993 a famous article by Raymond Duval highlighted a simple fact: students confuse the mathematical object O, that they are trying to build cognitively, with one of its semiotic representations R(O); he explained that this confusion was due to a sort of inevitable paradox: only someone who has already built O, can recognize R(O) as a representation of O and not as an object in itself. This idea has been extremely influential for researchers in the following years. However, many scholars of semiotics have emphasized the same phenomenon, even if in not quite the same words; in this paper we are going to mention some of them.