Math propulsion

Abstract

This paper describes a series of interaction design sketches we created to supplement mathematics curricula. These sketches were deployed in a variety of secondary school math classrooms in the San Francisco Bay Area. The activities purposefully use visualization and embodiment to engage students with the math concepts of geometric transformations and symmetrical patterning. These experiments exemplify how applying embodiment and visualization to traditionally impersonal and abstract subjects like math can make the learning experience more fun and active for students and offer new pedagogical strategies for teachers.

The Bodies of TEI – Investigating Norms and Assumptions in the Design of Embodied Interaction

“…Within the corpus, I identified 28 papers making one or more concrete technical contributions (see also, Table 11). In the spirit of looking "where the action is" [28], I grouped technologies according to which actions they afforded: Five papers present wearables, eight delineate the potentials of play, seven are located within contexts of making music and art (including artful explorations of maths subjects [84]), and another eight papers focus on experiences of feeling and reflecting on those. The specific groupings are further detailed in Table 5.…”

“…While this is not the case for all papers (and even presumably decidedly not for others, e.g., [64]), conventionally cis-male coded culture as show of force [89], skill [103] or expertise [46] further insinuate the assumption of a (white) cis-male body as expected target group. Authors similarly rarely specify the required skills relevant to engage with a specific technology [47], even if increased diversity of bodyminds engaging with a technology might lead to meaningful insights [84]. Additionally, some papers assume technologies as superior to 'the lived body' in that they might guide bodies into developing appropriate skills [132], disregarding potentially ambiguous and individually differing body signals in favour of providing numerical representations as communication starters [128] or translating bodily signals more generally [35].…”