QUESTION 9: What about digital?
At a recent team seminar, we discussed three questions about the use of digital technology in mathematics:
- Learning: is the cognitive experience the same on and off the computer? What is possible?
- Teaching and learning: what are the design principles for digital maths resources?
- Assessing, teaching and learning: how best can we teach and assess a curriculum that includes computer based elements?
The first seems to us to be a pivotal question, and is a necessary precursor to the others. Presenting a task in several different ways allows for comparability of experience and learning outcomes. For example, asking a student to construct an equilateral triangle from folding a strip of paper seems to be a very different ask from constructing an equilateral triangle either using a ruler and compasses, or using a dynamic geometry package such as Geogebra.
We are interested in exploring this further and would like to know your thoughts, and any significant research, that helps us to qualify or quantify the cognitive differences between using digital technology to teach and learn mathematics, and ‘traditional’ methods.