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The aim of this paper is to present a didactical sequence that fosters the development of meanings related to fractions, conceived as numbers that can be placed on the number line. The sequence was carried out in various elementary school…
The purpose of this paper (which, in many passages, I take the liberty of writing in the first person singular for bringing a personal experience) is to show how teachers of Physics and Mathematics in Basic Education can teach, through a…
Metric spaces are a fundamental component of mathematics and have a paramount importance as a framework for measuring distance. They can be found in many different branches of mathematics, such as analysis and topology. This paper offers an…
What if we take a broader view of what it means to run an education experiment? In this paper, we explore opportunities that arise when we think beyond the commonly-held notion that the purpose of an experiment is to either accept or reject…
Mathematics is the language of science. Fluent and productive use of mathematics requires one to understand the meaning embodied in mathematical symbols, operators, syntax, etc., which can be a difficult task. For instance, in algebraic…
Symbolic equations are one of the many representations used in physics. Understanding these representations is important for students because they are how students access knowledge in physics. In this paper I build off of the work by Redish…
Mathematical understanding is built in many ways. Among these, illustration has been a companion and tool for research for as long as research has taken place. We use the term illustration to encompass any way one might bring a mathematical…
Text embeddings have become central to computational social science and psychology, enabling scalable measurement of meaning and mixed-method inference. Yet most representation learning is optimized and evaluated for prediction and…
Visual insights into a wide variety of statistical methods, for both didactic and data analytic purposes, can often be achieved through geometric diagrams and geometrically based statistical graphs. This paper extols and illustrates the…
In this paper, the intuitive idea of tilt is formalised into the rigorous concept of tilt rotations. This is motivated by the high relevance that pure tilt rotations have in the analysis of balancing bodies in 3D, and their applicability to…
Making meaning with math in physics requires blending physical conceptual knowledge with mathematical symbology. Students in introductory physics classes often struggle with this, but it is an essential component of learning how to think…
The learning of mathematics starts early but remains far from any theoretical considerations: pupils' mathematical knowledge is first rooted in pragmatic evidence or conforms to procedures taught. However, learners develop a knowledge which…
Mathematical reasoning skills are a desired outcome of many introductory physics courses, particularly calculus-based physics courses. Positive and negative quantities are ubiquitous in physics, and the sign carries important and varied…
In this article, the notion of a mathematical model in science is attempted to be enlightened from several points of view. In particular, it is shown that mathematical models are introduced differently and used differently in different…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
This work examines student meaning-making in undergraduate physics problem-solving. We use a social semiotic perspective to sketch a theoretical framework. The social semiotic approach focuses on all types of meaning-making practices that…
It is nowadays common to consider that proof must be part of the learning of mathematics from Kindergarten to University1. As it is easy to observe, looking back to the history of mathematical curricula, this has not always been the case…
In this paper, we propose that 'embodied mathematics' should be studied not only by reduction to the present individual bodily experience but in an historical context as well, as far as the origins of mathematics are concerned. Some early…
Quaternions, discovered by Sir William Rowan Hamilton in the 19th century, are a significant extension of complex numbers and a profound tool for understanding three-dimensional rotations. This work explores the quaternion's history,…
Mathematical conception of infinite quantities forms a cornerstone of many disciplines of modern mathematics --- from differential calculus to set theory. In fact, it could be argued that the most significant revolutions in mathematics in…