Presented by Camden Bock, Ph.D. student in STEM Education for the School of Learning and Teaching Research Brown Bag series. In school geometry, diagrams are typically inscribed on plane surfaces (e.g., whiteboards, paper, projector screens), at scales smaller than the learners who inscribe them. Spatial diagrams, rendered with virtual reality, offer depth and human-scale to learners’ mathematical diagramming. With spatial diagrams, learners might stand beside, look from above, or step inside a diagram. Further, learners could inscribe diagrams around themselves (e.g., using their body as an axis of revolution). Spatial diagrams also offer an opportunity to extend research on embodied mathematics, where networks of learners’ bodies can be part of the construction of a diagram. Bock will present on the design of a study of learners’ collaborative use of human-scale diagrams. This study seeks to extend Bock’s research on the affordance of point-of-view in spatial diagrams and understand how human-scale diagrams shape learners’ embodied discourse while they collaboratively create, manipulate and mark-up mathematical diagrams. This work extends understandings of learners’ use of perspective in digital (Bock and Dimmel, 2021a, 2021b; Dimmel et al., 2020) and physical (Benally et al., 2022) spatial diagrams, the inscription of diagrams in space (Ng and Sinclair, 2018; Cangas et al., 2019), and the embodied relationships between learners and diagrams (Sinclair et al., 2013; de Freitas and Sinclair, 2014).
Venue: Shibles Hall, Room 207