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Designing educational software: The case of grid algebra

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-13, 12:54 authored by Dave Hewitt
To be successful educational software needs to be carefully designed in order to provide constraints and freedoms (Greeno 1994) which relate to its educational aims, restrict or enable learners and teachers to carry out certain actions, and be based upon a clear set of beliefs related to the complex dynamic of teaching and learning. This paper seeks to show the contraints and freedoms built in to the design of Grid Algebra; software which offers an intuitive and novel approach to early algebraic learning, and how they have been informed by a clear set of beliefs and frameworks. The paper shows how the design has taken into consideration known misconceptions that many learners exhibit with early algebra work and how the three frameworks of arbitrary and necessary, subordination and embodied cognition have been fundamental to the design of both the software and some of the activities used with the software. The paper finishes off with considering limitations of the software as well as some strengths that its design offers, and poses questions to consider about the design of this and other resources

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education Centre

Published in

Digital Experiences in Mathematics Education

Citation

HEWITT, D., 2016. Designing educational software: The case of grid algebra. Digital Experiences in Mathematics Education, 2 (2), pp. 167-198.

Publisher

© Springer

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016-05-03

Notes

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40751-016-0018-4.

ISSN

2199-3246

eISSN

2199-3254

Language

  • en

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