Math History Final Project: Women in Computer Science

 Link to presentation slides

The Marshall Islands and Embodied Mathematics

The most interesting part of this article was the idea of maps as mathematical abstractions and analogical spaces. I find this interesting because of mapping’s connection to comics and graphic novels; artists and writers Scott McCloud and Dylan Horrocks have described comics as maps of time and space. Prior to starting the B.Ed program at UBC, I was finishing up my last English requirement where I wrote my final paper on Dylan Horrock’s graphic novel Hicksville. Written in the 1990s, Hicksville is the semibiographical work of the Pakeha New Zealander navigating time, pre and post-colonial New Zealand, and space, Aotearoa, or New Zealand, in relation to the world. Despite being a fan of Randall Munroe of XKCD and Ben Orlin of Math with Bad Drawings, I had failed to make a deeper connection between mathematics and comic form. 

I think the significance of embodied mathematics in relation to the history of mathematics is shown in the origins of what we call mathematics today. Mathematics came into existence from the world as a way for us to communicate with each other and represent ideas, concepts, and knowledge. Math teachers often feel the need to cover the prescribed curricular content that students’ understanding of mathematics is mostly procedural and they lack a conceptual understanding of mathematics. From experience, the fast-paced coverage of material often leads to a low level of knowledge retention, so the teacher’s efforts are in vain. Luckily for us as teachers in BC, our Ministry of Education has recently shifted the emphasis of the curriculum, making content a vehicle to drive competencies. In our current situation, it makes it easier for us as math educators to have students focus on the process of contextualization, discovery and embodying of mathematics. Hopefully, this facilitates a higher level of retention and a deeper understanding of mathematics. 

In teaching secondary mathematics, embodied mathematics can take the form of a relational learning approach to conceptualizing pi of the primary trigonometric ratios of sine, cosine, and tangent through measurement of varying-sized circular and right-triangular objects, teaching operations with fractions through coins, making clinometers for indirect measurements of tall objects, or seeing quadratic behaviour through collecting and modelling height and distance data of a thrown ball or launched pneumatic rocket. I don’t think it’s a lack of creativity or ingenuity of the teacher that results in a lack of embodied mathematics in high school classes. From my experience, teachers often reserve experiences of embodied mathematics for their honours classes since they can’t get through content faster and are afforded these richer learning opportunities. Additionally, institutional norms and pressure from students, parents, other teachers, and administration to prepare students for written tests is another major factor that we do not see more of this in high school classrooms.