The Ministry of Education advocates the use of GSP in the teaching and learning of geometry (Ministry of Education, 2003) as it “can best foster mathematical inquiry and learning through ‘dynamic manipulation’ experiments” (Finzer & Jackiw, 1998: 2). GSP, with its dynamic manipulation environments, has three important attributes. First, students can directly manipulate mathematical objects represented on the screen. For example, students point at a cube vertex and can directly drag it from point
A to point B (see Figure 1). Second, mathematical objects stay coherent at all times as they are dragged. Continuing the cube example, as the cube’s vertex moves from point
A to point B, students can see that the length of the edges and the orientation of the cube change continuously but the resulting figure will always be a cube. Third, students feel that they are involved with the objects they are manipulating: that is, they are immersed in the environment.