Opportunities and Challenges of Bodily Interaction for Geometry Learning to Inform Technology Design

Abstract

An increasing body of work provides evidence of the importance of bodily experience for cognition and the learning of mathematics. Sensor-based technologies have potential for guiding sensori-motor engagement with challenging mathematical ideas in new ways. Yet, designing environments that promote an appropriate sensori-motoric interaction that effectively supports salient foundations of mathematical concepts is challenging and requires understanding of opportunities and challenges that bodily interaction offers. This study aimed to better understand how young children can, and do, use their bodies to explore geometrical concepts of angle and shape, and what contribution the different sensori-motor experiences make to the comprehension of mathematical ideas. Twenty-nine students aged 6-10 years participated in an exploratory study, with paired and group activities designed to elicit intuitive bodily enactment of angles and shape. Our analysis, focusing on moment-by-moment bodily interactions, attended to gesture, action, facial expression, body posture and talk, illustrated the 'realms of possibilities' of bodily interaction, and highlighted challenges around 'felt' experience and egocentric vs. allocentric perception of the body during collaborative bodily enactment. These findings inform digital designs for sensory interaction to foreground salient geometric features and effectively support relevant forms of enactment to enhance the learning experience, supporting challenging aspects of interaction and exploiting the opportunities of the body.

Multisensory Perception and Learning: Linking Pedagogy, Psychophysics, and Human–Computer Interaction

“…Accordingly, we collected data on childrens' spontaneous, intuitive body actions and bodily representation for engaging with and creating angles and shapes to understand how whole-body sensory experiences can engage children in meaning-making around ideas of shape and angles (Price & Duffy, 2018). This study engaged 29 students from 7 to 11 years of age to examine the kinds of bodily movements children make and how they interpret and use them to experience different angles and shapes.…”

“…The study aligned activities with the school curriculum in the UK (also consistent with pedagogical goals in other educational systems across Europe). It defined angles as a geometric figure (a pair of rays with a common endpoint), a dynamic figure (a turn or rotation), and a measure (Price & Duffy, 2018). Children worked in groups of 3 or 4 with three tasks: (i) to use their bodies to make angles; (ii) use their bodies to make shapes; and (iii) use their bodies to create symmetry of shapes.…”

“…The current review speaks to these topics by bringing together an interdisciplinary team composed of pedagogical, educational, neuroscientific, and technological experts to present state of the art in research findings from across these disciplines. In particular, the review builds upon previous work devoted to presenting the concept and methodology of our research (Price & Duffy, 2018) and extends it by identifying how this approach -grounded in neuroscientific and pedagogical evidence -provides a unique contribution to the development of new technological solutions for school learning. It mainly focuses on the authors' lab work, the studies carried out and the results obtained by applying the methodology that the project consortium proposed in the framework of the EU-H2020-ICT project 'weDRAW'.…”

AlloHaptic: Robot-Mediated Haptic Collaboration for Learning Linear Functions

“…Mathematics is special field of science that contains the most abstract concepts among other fields. Several studies explore the possibility of improving children conceptualization of mathematical concepts by making the abstract more tangible [34], [35]. Bodily gestures are considered as a rich source of information that both students and teachers make mostly unconsciously while expressing graphs [36], [34].…”

“…Several studies explore the possibility of improving children conceptualization of mathematical concepts by making the abstract more tangible [34], [35]. Bodily gestures are considered as a rich source of information that both students and teachers make mostly unconsciously while expressing graphs [36], [34]. These studies indicate that students with robust mathematical conceptualization use verbal/kinesthetic/visual cues to express their imagination of graphs [37].…”