Learning Number with TouchCounts: The Role of Emotions and the Body in Mathematical Communication
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Learning Number with TouchCounts: The Role of Emotions and the Body in Mathematical Communication Nathalie Sinclair • Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract In this paper we describe a touchscreen application called TouchCounts, which is designed to support the development of number sense in the early years. We first provide an a priori analysis of its affordances. Then, using Sfard’s communicational approach, augmented by a focus both on the role of the body—particularly the fingers and hands— and emotions in the mathematical communication of a child, a teacher and a touchscreen device, we show how two 5-year-old girls learn about counting and adding. Keywords Emotions Tools Touchscreen Gestures Goals Number sense Communicational approach Early years
1 Introduction The touchscreen is a novel technological affordance in mathematics education. Through its direct mediation, it offers new opportunities for mathematical expressivity. Touchscreen devices enable children to produce and transform objects with fingers and gestures, instead of through a keyboard or mouse. This makes it easier for many users to interact with these devices, but it also opens the way for new forms of mathematical communication that are haptic and tangible. Touchscreen devices such as iPads are also compelling, becoming for many ‘‘evocative objects’’, a term Turkle (2011) uses to underscore the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationships to things. Various researchers have noted the high level of interest that children seem to have when working with iPads (e.g., Lange and Meaney 2013). Indeed, since Papert (1980), researchers have pointed to—often
N. Sinclair (&) Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC V5A1S6, Canada e-mail: [email protected] E. Heyd-Metzuyanim Department of Education in Science and Technology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, 3200003 Haifa, Israel
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N. Sinclair, E. Heyd-Metzuyanim
anecdotally—the emotional impact of expressive tools on learners, particularly including learners’ apparent enthusiasm, interest and satisfaction. But little research has been done on how exactly the emotional dimension of learning interacts with the cognitive one and, more specifically, on how the emotional dimension of learning relates to emerging theories of embodiment. We are thus interested in the question of how learning is mediated by the affective and embodied (tapping and gesturing, but also swaying and rhythmically moving) actions and interactions of the child/teacher/tool. In this paper, we will present a new application called TouchCounts (Sinclair and Jackiw 2011), whose design was motivated by the new affordances of touchscreen technology. Unlike many ‘‘educational’’ applications that can be found for the iPad, TouchCounts is open-ended and exploratory, rather than practice- and level-driven. It aims to support the development of number sense by offering modes of interaction with these mathematical concepts that feature the fingers
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