While educational robotics is more frequently utilized in teaching students about engineering principles. In this presentation, Ting Zhang, a 3rd year EDCP PhD student shared his robotics teaching experience in the field of mathematics. He introduced the LEGO WEDO kit to demonstrate how students as young as grade 2/3 use the kit to build different models that feature working motors and sensors and how the mathematical thinking is visible during the class.

Presenter: Ting Zhang (3rd-Year PhD student, mathematics Education, EDCP)

Please find below some excerpts from Ting’s presentation

Is my greatest pleasure to welcome each of you to 2016. Happy New Year!

I humbly invite you to our first SyMETRI meeting of the term. We plan to open this term’s meetings with a mock PhD defense presentation from Jeff Beaker (PhD Candidate, UBC) as we have usually used our SyMETRI platform to share thoughts or provide feedback on research ideas, impending conference presentations, and thesis or dissertation defense practice of our members.

Date/Time: Jan 26, 4:30pm-6:30pm

Venue: Scarfe Room 310

Please kindly find below an abstract of Jeff Baker’s research:

This dissertation shares the story of my research exploring the transformative possibilities of Indigenous Science Education for catalyzing the emergence of more equitable and sustainable ways of living. It is an educational response to humanitarian and ecological crises, and draws on the holistic frames of complexity and Indigenous knowledges to balance the dominance of the mechanistic worldview in which these crises are rooted, and that also permeates school science. Weaving participatory action research and Indigenous research methodologies into a form of Indigenous Métissage, my research sought to decolonize and Indigenize school science, and eventually came to focus on sharing my own story of change and transformation. The research was conducted through four years of participation and relationship building in the local Indigenous education community in my hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, largely through ceremony, and employed conversation and anecdotal narrative as primary methods. These experiences led me to suggest miskasowin, a Plains Cree term meaning “to find one’s centre” or “true sense of self” as a goal of Indigenous Science Education, which I interpret as a process of “learning to relate,” fostering more relational worldviews and identities that connect us in multiple ways with the dynamic, living, patterns of nature. I describe my own process of miskasowin as shaped by complexity and Indigenous knowledges and occurring through a “slow pedagogy of relations” that involved ceremony, story, land, and language, and that fostered a deeper sense of humility and reverence for life.

On October 20, 2015 SyMETRI meeting, we discussed an interesting article posted by Dr. Milner-Bolotin. The article explores “whether knowledge of physics guides attention differently for experts and novices when they inspect physics-relevant changes or physics-irrelevant changes” (Morphew, Mestre, Ross & Strand, 2015). Prime highlights of the discussion focused on the following questions:

who is an expert or novice ?

How will educators positionality as experts or novice influence their teaching strategies and relationship with students? Interesting in the discussion was the need for educators to take humbling stance in their approach to teaching rather than positioning themselves as people who “know it all” (Milner-Bolotin).

We also did an interesting visual cognition exercise (led by Dr. Nicol)

The diagram below is one of many diagrams from the article we discussed. Participants in the study where asked to identify “physics relevant” changes in the diagrams.

Thanks to everyone who made it to this week’s meeting. We are looking forward to meeting you all on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2015: 1:00 – 2:30 pm.

Parental Involvement in Children’s mathematics learning: Case of Nkanfoa, South Western part of Ghana.

Kwesi Yaro, masters student (Mathematics Education)

This study reports a case study I carried out in Nkanfoa rural Community in Cape Coast, South-western part of Ghana. The study focused on parents from diverse social, cultural, economic backgrounds with low formal education and how these parents support their grade four children’s mathematics learning. In this study, fourteen respondents, comprising of three parents with low formal education, their 8-9 year old children as well as the children’s classroom teachers (one from each of the two rural basic schools), participated in semi-structured individual face to face interviews. In addition, home observations were used to gather data.

Descriptive analysis seems to suggest that teachers appear to down play the potential of parents with low formal education in contributing to their children’s mathematics learning. However, these parents with low formal education were able to describe ways they engage their children (8-9 years) in mathematics at home through informal activities, interactions, and games. Most importantly, it was featured prominently that participation through mentorship and engagement in local business transactions is used as learning as well as an evaluation context for one’s mathematics competence. Parents irrespective of their low or no formal education seems to value the social justice aspect a “good mathematics” can have. Thus, “Giving and receiving correct change” is perceived a key determinant or characteristic of one’s moral standing in ensuring fairness to others as well as a promise of future success in mathematics and education in general.

Implication for Practice

This study reports several examples of the informal activities, conversations, and games in which parents from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, who are neither mathematics educators nor literates, engage their young children (8-9 years), the study rekindles the conversation on the crucial role parents may/do still play in enhancing their children’s mathematics learning at home, irrespective of parents’ formal mathematics competencies.

Hello everyone,

My apologies for a late post, but here is the link to my Prezi from the SyMETRI meeting on February 10th. I’m excited to say that I have submitted my article for publication, so the waiting game has started! In the article, I consider an interview with a nine year-old student, Ashley, as she works through the puzzle “How Many Towers?” Of particular interest to me after the interviewing process, was Ashley’s tendency to organize her constructed towers into “families” which corresponded to her method of building larger towers from smaller ones. Throughout the interview, I observed Ashley’s organizational strategies prompting new discoveries, while conversely, new discoveries prompted new organizational strategies.

http://prezi.com/eivnchgvgpry/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Myron Medina presents his interests for his doctoral research :

My current research interest looks at how Belizean cultural artifacts (coral carvings, Mayan paintings, music etc.) can be used as mediums to embody and visualize certain mathematical patterns (e.g. symmetry, fractals). A forest school will be opening at Caye Caulker, an ecological island off the coast of Belize, that will experiment with outdoor/ecological learning. Since mathematics education in Belize is often teaching to the test, this presents an opportunity to incorporate the notion of embodied knowledge via local cultural practices within the mathematics curriculum. Since it is important to engage the senses in learning, some broad questions are: In what ways can these resources be used to teach and learn math? What would students take away from these experiences?

Terms: embodiment, visualization, ethnomathematics, cultural ecology

SyMETRI is a research group for all those interested in exploring, questioning, inquiring into, and doing mathematics and science education research. As a research group we meet regularly to share research projects, dissertation and thesis research, academic and professional presentations, teaching ideas and projects, and work on mathematics and science together.