There’s a lot to think about when creating an environment for meaningful whole body math learning. Luckily, not only is the new book  filled with a wide range of information for implementing this approach in your classroom but we also have our Facebook Book Group as a space for conversations and support.

Recently a question came in on the FB group from a math teacher in the UK.  Jason Gottfried has been working on ideas for adding whole body movement into his teaching. His question and our resulting (slightly edited) conversation illustrate some of the important thinking that goes into creating and assessing activities where children’s whole bodies are engaged in making sense of math ideas.

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JASON:
Hi all, I’m planning to experiment with coding and Math in Your Feet type choreography this Sunday. I will get participants to sequence dance “instructions” fairly loosely within beats in a bar and see if they or others can follow the “program”. I should be able to introduce loops and possibly conditional structures also. I’m thinking that instructions can be on cards and laid on a grid representing 4 beat bars. Any ideas about how to make this work out there? Love to hear about any activities like this that you may have done or heard about. Thanks.

MALKE:
The coding connection is a strong one! I think the thing to think about here is that children often need time to get used to the precision footwork (and benefit highly from doing so) before they can move forward toward “operations” on those patterns.  How much choice will they have in either creating or choosing the dance patterns? How much choice will they have in creating the program?

When thinking about programming in particular, and the body’s role in math learning in general, Seymour Papert’s book Mindstorms comes immediately to mind. In the book he reminds us that children have powerful ideas; his work with the LOGO turtle showed that kids will learn and thrive in an environment of exploration. It’s likely your participants will be able to follow along, but it might be way more fun for them, given some basic ideas, to create their own programs for others to “de-bug”.

JASON:
Thanks for the ideas. The idea of debugging a program is a few levels above what I had thought of. Amazing! I’ve currently produced a row of 4 cells to hold the “program” and I have instructions which are pictures of feet positions that children have to get their feet into for that beat. At the festival I’ll be at I usually get children aged 5 – 10 come and engage; I’m hoping I can get them to try to dance one of my programs and then try to arrange one themselves using cards with feet positions already on them and blank cards if needed. I don’t think I’m using actual footwork and I am not sure (but intrigued by the idea of) how to perform operations on the footwork. It’s totally experimental for me. I’ll definitely let you know how it went. Thanks again for the support.

MALKE:
So a simple way to create more exploration/agency would be to give them a program with the cards and then ask them if they want to try making a different “program” using the same cards. Which program “feels” better to execute? Is there anything they wish they could do that they don’t have a card/command for? Maybe have blank cards handy so they can create their own commands? That would be more than enough for a festival — a simple prompt/provocation and a chance to play around with making it different. Can’t wait to hear/see more!

JASON:
That’s it! Linking it to how it feels is great! That feels like the bit I was missing. Thank you. I’ll let you know how it went. Attached a picture of my son playing with the instructions. He had a couple of tries then went for the most complicated dance possible. Another angle I suppose.

Continue reading “Conversation: Getting started with #movingmath” →

I see a lot of parallels between the work kids do in Math in Your Feet and the Maker Movement. Not only is the human body our original “technology” and the tool with which we learn about the world and develop our cognition from birth, but the “maker” philosophy aligns with my own approach to bringing math and dance together in elementary classrooms.

Mitch Resnick is the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. Resnick recently sat down for a conversation with EdSurge. You can read the whole conversation but, below, I’ve focused on his thoughts about the process of making.

When one comes upon a whole classroom of moving bodies dancing in little blue tape squares it’s easy to to miss the forest for the trees, in the sense that it looks a lot like dance and not a whole lot like math. The reality is that math making and dance making have a lot in common. Both share a process by which the learner experiments, asks questions, revises, reflects and…often….has something tangible (an answer or some choreography) to show for it.  Resnick’s comments below resonate with the premise of the new book.

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One of the things that appeals to me about the maker movement is that it’s not just about making. That’s an important part of what the maker movement is about. If you give a child a set of step-by-step instructions and build something, in one way, they’ve made something—but that’s not the spirit of the maker movement.