Years 3-9
All ACM Strands
Andrew Peters
Healesville Cluster

Healesville Cluster – Big Day Out; Worawa College

iPad Activity – ‘Finding Maths Everywhere” – Caty Morris and Andrew Peters

Summary

This activity was conducted with the aims of:

  • Contextualising maths to the world around the students – ie things they see in their everyday lives
  • Allowing the students to utilise technology with which they are familiar (ie iPads) to capture images of maths that they see around them
  • Getting students to understand the notion of context and maths – that they can ‘learn’ about maths in a range of different ways and environments
  • Relating contemporary learning to fundamental notions of (‘traditional’) Indigenous knowledges and ways of learning

Each group of students (approx. 8 – 10 students in each group) was given a brief introduction to the activity. This included a brief PowerPoint slide show that gave some pictorial examples of ‘contextualised maths’ in the world around us. These examples included pictures of buildings, bridges, park benches, poles and flowers. With each picture, the example of maths was highlighted to the students, including:

  • Addition, multiplication, subtraction, algebra (number of objects etc)
  • Patterns and sequences
  • Geometry (shapes and angles)

The students were divided into pairs (or threes) and given an iPad with which to go outside and take some pictures of maths that they could locate in the surroundings at Worawa College. Examples of pictures taken included grass, groups of stones and pebbles, buildings, trees, flowers, and windows.

The students then returned and each group was asked to select their favourite 3 pictures, and delete the others. They then described their favourite picture, and were encouraged to ‘find the maths’ in the picture that they took. Caty and Andrew (the Activity Leaders) then led a discussion of specifically how they had found ‘maths’ in their pictures – for example, a picture of a grate highlighted parallel lines; a picture of a daisy showed a circle with a number of flower petals; one picture of a building identified the angels between the lines of the structure.

Andrew closed each session with a brief discussion of how this activity, and the contextualising of maths in this way (ie ‘finding maths’ in the environment around them) has similarities to the notion of ‘traditional’ Indigenous knowledges and ways of learning. This was explained that the word ‘maths’ as we understand it has come to mean recognising numbers, shapes, angles etc. as they appear in a text book, and that the ‘rules’ around maths are quite strict and clear. We looked at the photographs, and were able to see that the concepts that underpin ‘textbook maths’ as we learn it in the classroom are visible in everything we see around us – not just in our maths books.

This activity hopefully allowed the students to see maths as outside the text book, and perhaps gain a little knowledge into how the concept of ‘mathematics’ as we understand it in contemporary society may have been understood, utilised and learned in pre-contact Indigenous Australia. The fundamental belief of ‘wholism’ for Indigenous Australians – that everything is connected, and each element of the world around us affects, and is affected by the others (as opposed to the ‘compartmentalising’ of our contemporary Western education system – was also briefly explained to the groups (although, of course, with more student-appropriate terminology).