Inspiring learning means to aim for promoting skills, knowledge, and interest. In a pre-post-test inter-vention study (N = 282, two experimental groups: real materials vs. digital materials, control group) we investigated whether experiments with real materials or digital materials based on GeoGebra are an appropriate measure to promote the functional thinking of sixth graders. Even though both types of material led to a significant increase in functional thinking, the increase of the digital material group was significantly higher. Digging deeper into data we found, that the use of either material has a different impact on the learning of functional thinking. To inspire teaching we use a concept of long-term in-service teacher training, were the analysis of video vignettes from student work pro-cesses within our online learning environment ViviAn is one measure among several others.