Representational Fluency of Angle during an Educational Robotics Task

Abstract

In this study, we examined how a small group of fourth grade students used representational fluency during an educational robotic task situated within a makerspace environment. Specifically, we considered how representational fluency played a role in their mathematical understanding of angle, a concept that is difficult for many students to understand. Results from video data revealed that various representations (e.g., language, gesture, concrete) within the task afforded students the opportunity to communicate more fluently about the concept of angle. We argue that attendance to multimodal representations, and the communication that occurs around and between those representations, better supports and reveals mathematical learning in non-formal contexts.