SFU Canada Research Chairs Seminar Series: "Developing Young Learners' Number Sense through Multitouch"

Abstract

I present TouchCounts, an iPad application designed for pre-school and primary school children. It enables immediate, multitouch interaction through fingers and gestures, permitting students to coordinate simultaneously named, indexed, enumerated, and numeralized aspects of number. I will describe its underlying design principles in relation to recent findings in educational technology, neuroscience and cognitive science. I will then demonstrate examples of how using TouchCounts, both with individuals and with groups, helps young children change the way they think about number, shifting from procedural, sing-song rote counting to conceptual naming and comparing of quantities. Finally, I demonstrate the affective and aesthetic dimensions of children's experiences as they create and play with numbers.