Speakers
Description
In this research paper, we discuss how students’ engagement in a specially-designed learning environment, that combines mathematics and music through digital resources, can provoke aesthetic experiences and shape their mathematics learning. Eighteen 11th grade students participated in an activity for creating digitally animated figures moving through periodic functions, tuned and matched to specific musical pieces according to their own aesthetic criteria. Their dialogs, actions within the digital resources and body expressions were analysed through the CrEAM model that connects the sensory (connected to the senses) to the intellectual (connected to making sense) type of aesthetic experiences. The results indicate that students were gradually involved in richer and deeper sense-making on mathematical properties in order to express increasingly complex aesthetic criteria for their animations connected to ideas and emotions provoked by the music. This co-evolving relation between sensing and making sense mirrors the importance of cultivating aesthetic experiences in mathematics classroom.
CV
Chronis Kynigos
directs the Educational Technology Lab at the Department of Educational Studies, School Of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). He has designed three authoring systems for modelling, grappling with socio-scientific issues and classification respectively. He has been studying mathematical meanings formed by students creating and tinkering with expressive digital media, but also ways to engage teachers in the design of such media. His research interests include the design and implementation of innovative interventions in education based on the use of expressive constructionist digital media. He has been actively involved in 13 multi-organizational competitive European research projects.
Myrto Karavakou
is a PhD student at the Department of Educational Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) in Greece. She holds a bachelor degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in mathematics education from the Department of Mathematics of the NKUA. Her thesis focuses on the way students use and make sense of mathematics while using it for artistic expression to create dancing graphical animated models through digital technologies and programming. Her wider research interests include the way aesthetic experiences can be cultivated and transform the learning of mathematics.
