Learning Angles through Movement: Critical Actions for Developing Understanding in an Embodied Activity

This week I read Learning Angles through Movement: Critical Actions for Developing Understanding in an Embodied Activity by Smith, King, and Hoyte (2014).  In it, they discuss a fascinating study they undertook with a class of third and fourth grade students and a motion tracking device called Kinect.   They developed a motion-controlled angle task for their students to undertake where they would move their arms to form angles that would then be displayed on a screen.  They concluded that the task was able to help the students develop understanding between the abstract, visual representation of angles, and the physically embodied representation of angles.  Previously, the authors noted that “body-based dynamic angles representations [were] difficult [due to a lack of] visual support” (p. 106).  I think that motion-tracking technology like Kinect has such potential to provide support for learning through embodied moving.  I can imagine students learning about linear equations where they are provided a Cartesian plane, but then must move their arms to create the right slope and intercept. 

This study reminds me of an activity I did with a grade 11 class over the Summer.  We were learning about the hard-to-grasp ambiguous case of the sine law, a topic that students almost always struggle with.  But this year I brought some woodworking tools to school and had students build physical triangles as per a set of instructions.    They noticed that in certain cases their group built a different triangle than other groups.  Our last activity had us constructing a triangle with one swinging arm to represent the ambiguity.  The physicality of the activity, being able to tangibly swing the arm of the ambiguous triangle helped the students connect with this otherwise abstract concept.