Teaching kinematics using mathematics history

This article describes a proposal for teaching kinematics using mathematics history; recognizing that history, mathematics, physics and language share similar knowledge structures that must be articulated to achieve teaching-learning processes. To account for this, we discuss how mathematics and physics has historically contributed to describe motion representations. A learning unit is described based on the experimental technique that probably Galileo used to measure times and distances and is not well known by textbooks' authors. This experimentation with intervention tries to interrogate students' alternative ideas. We intended to provoke a conceptual change using several mathematical and physical representations that have been constructed throughout history and have allowed describing the nature in a better way. A qualitative study of the experience in a physics class was carried out. Forty students aged about 13-years-old from a public secondary school in Mexico City participated in the study. The learning unit described in this article was the first stage of a broader study constituted by five stages. It was important to work with students to establish the relationship between the variables involved in the description of uniformly accelerated motion, so as the ratio between the distances travelled and the time elapsed.