What is it about?
Students often struggle to see what math has to do with the real world, and would like math class to include more concrete examples. But what makes a good concrete example? Is it because it's visual? interactive? relatable? In this paper, we define different forms of concreteness and evaluate their potential for mathematics education.
Featured Image
Photo by Trnava University on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This paper offers two important contributions. First, we discuss the meaning of concreteness and show that different forms of concreteness impact learning differently. Second, we show that embodied and relatable activities in Virtual Reality are a powerful way of teaching abstract mathematics as it helps students understand the importance of learning these concepts, but also prepares them better for the rest of the lecture.
Perspectives
I particularly enjoyed this project as I believe it opens an important conversation on the many perspectives on concreteness in mathematics education. I believe that this work can help support further exploration on the affective and cognitive mechanisms of learning with concreteness.
Julia Chatain
ETH Zürich
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Grounding Graph Theory in Embodied Concreteness with Virtual Reality, February 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3569009.3572733.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
