Stepping out of rhythm: an embodied artifact for noticing rate of change

Making sense of data is fundamental to science. Yet, the form in which data are represented can make their interpretation challenging for students. We introduce an activity that transformed a data table into an embodied artifact. The activity helped 8th grade students interpret the data to find that cold water warmed “fast-then-slow,” in other words, that the rate of warming decreased over time. For the activity, students were invited to “act out” the temperature change by walking along a giant horizontal thermometer while their classmates clapped out the passage of time. To arrive at the correct temperature at the right time, students had to continually slow their pace. We offer a microgenetic analysis of the activity to illuminate how it helped participating students notice that the cold water’s temperature warmed fast-then-slow, developing an account of the students’ passage from action to understanding. We argue that embodied representations can be effectively coupled with tools and traditional symbolic systems to make abstract concepts more accessible, opening an alternative route for students to engage in rich mathematical reasoning and scientific sense-making.