Humans often represent abstract mathematical concepts through gestures. These gestures are prompted to support sense-making and communication. In this project, we explore how collaborative learning in Virtual Reality can support the production of communication gestures.
Research on embodied cognition and embodied learning has highlighted how bodily movements, either spontaneous or directed, can support learning of mathematical concepts, especially abstract ones. Virtual Reality has often been explored as a technology to enable such experiences, as it tracks learners’ movements and thus supports the bodily manipulation of mathematical objects at scale. However, much research on VR for embodied learning has focused on individual experiences. But while human bodily movement is often triggered to support sense-making, humans also move in order to communicate with another person or agent.
In this project, we explore how VR technology can support multi-human learning of mathematics. Moreover, as mathematics learning happens through translation between concrete representations, for example objects, drawings, or gestures, to abstract representations, for example symbols, we explore how to design VR learning activities to support collaborative learning using both concrete and abstract representations. Altogether, the goal of this project is to shed light on how communication amongst humans but also between humans and machines can help making sense of mathematical concepts as well as mathematical language.
