Making Manipulatives for Mathematics Education

This paper describes the efforts of an interdisciplinary team of researchers as they collaborated to create a digital fabrication curriculum module for mathematics teacher education. The initial four-day workshop design was piloted with five pre-service teachers. The design objective was to introduce digital fabrication techniques joint with mathematical concepts and the design of classroom activities to develop pre-service teachers' technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge. The workshops included activities to find, adapt, create, and share mathematical manipulatives using digital fabrication tools, techniques, and platforms. Manipulatives are tangible objects reifying mathematical concepts and one type of representation used in mathematics teaching. The paper reports on the design process and our design motivations to address contextual constraints and varying levels of exposure to digital fabrication for both pre-service teachers and teacher educators. The developed "find-adapt-create-share" framework for introducing digital fabrication was evaluated through researchers' self-reflection and pre-service teachers' feedback during concluding interviews.