When I looked through Melissa’s emoji story, I immediately thought it was SuperSize Me, and I thought I was for sure right when I quickly browsed the comments and saw that another student had also guessed that. The actual solution is a Disney movie called Heavyweight, which I have never seen, so I wouldn’t have been able to guess it anyways. Even if Melissa had just put the title as emojis and then physically written out the entire plot of the movie, I still wouldn’t have been able to guess the name of the movie. At first, I looked at the title and did what her brother did, and thought it was a movie called “burger man.” Using emojis as symbolic representations is really difficult, as everyone has different interpretations of emojis and their meanings.
“Since we interpret and understand some symbols differently, it would be extremely difficult to communicate simply via symbols as this task demonstrates unless there was a widespread rule or understanding about what each symbol fundamentally means.”
This made me smile, because I instantly thought about Math when I read this sentence. Math is the same in every language, as it uses universally understood symbols. I experienced the power of math as a language when I had English Language Learners in my classroom. I had to try to assess what level of understanding they were at, and my district had created an ELL non-verbal assessment, which got rid of any words and focused only on diagrams, symbols, and numbers.
Here is an example of an assessment for Level D, which relates to Grade 3/4 outcomes.
What I like about these types of questions, is that words are not needed to communicate the next steps. All that is needed for a student to begin is one completed example, and the rest of the task becomes apparent.