This study investigates the use of manipulatives by elementary students working on a fraction task. Extending previous work on the role played by the manipulatives in students' activity, we aim at describing how the choices made for the task design disrupt students' activity, creating opportunities to learn. The theoretical underpinnings allow…

This study examines the construct of distance -- the degree of difficulty of interacting with something -- as part of activity involving children using touchscreen digital games to learn mathematics. Ten fifth-grade children engaged in video-recorded semi-structured task-based interviews in which they used two touchscreen digital mathematics games…

In this article, the authors provide an overview of engineering and the engineering design process, and describe the steps they took to develop a fifth grade-level, standards-based engineering design task titled "Getting the Dirt on Decomposition." Their main goal was to focus more on modeling the discrete steps they took to create and…