Manipulative-based instructional sequences have proven to be successful with students with disabilities. However, instruction must not only support the acquisition of conceptual and procedural knowledge but also build on students' strengths. This article describes how teachers can use manipulative-based instructional sequences to support the…

The COVID-19 pandemic affected a large range of in-person education activities in Colombia. This created great limitations in academic performance for students with reduced access to communication technologies and deepened the educational gaps in the country. This was particularly true for sciences such as biochemistry. In Colombia, molecular…

Finding ways for students to use manipulatives in a safe, yet collaborative, manner is a challenge the 2020-2021 school year introduced. Teachers scrambled to create a set of manipulatives for individual use on a budget so students could learn from home, in hybrid environments, or in socially distanced classrooms. This article presents a…

In Japan during the 1980s, there was an interesting debate about how to teach the area of a parallelogram effectively to primary school children. Yutaka Saeki criticized the standard method, which relies on a cut-and-paste procedure. He argued that the standard method inevitably failed to convince children because it does not provide any cogent…

The duo of artefacts is a simplified model of the complex systems of various manipulatives (either tangible or virtual) that mathematics teachers and their students use in classrooms. It offers a means to study the complexity of the interweaving of the tangible and of the digital worlds in the teaching and learning processes. A duo of artefacts is…

Many approaches to teaching Newman projections and conformational manipulation rely on lecturing using only two-dimensional representations. While molecular models are recognized as useful learning tools, students are often left to figure out how to use them during the initial learning process. The availability of basic online molecular models…

In this note we describe the mathematics that emerges from the construction of an origami box. We first construct a simple origami box from two rectangular sheets and then discuss some of the mathematical questions that arise in the context of algebra, geometry and calculus.

LEGO® stop-motion animations were developed to engage first-year university students in the topics of matrices, vectors, linear geometry and linear transformations. LEGO® provided a versatile medium through which a wide range of concrete and abstract concepts could be physically demonstrated in both two and three dimensions. It was also familiar…

The purpose of this note is to describe the mathematics that emanates from the construction of an origami box. We first construct a simple origami box from two rectangular sheets and then discuss some of the mathematical questions that arise in the context of geometry and algebra.

Many mathematics teachers and students are familiar with the typical "box problem." In this type of problem, one takes a rectangular (or a square) sheet of paper and cuts out four squares from the four corners of the sheet and then folds the four strips up to form a box. Math problems like this are seen in middle school, high school,…

Understanding the gross organization of skeletal muscle is critical to understanding the mechanism of action of muscle physiology. Due to coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), many colleges have had to discontinue or curtail teaching and laboratory activities. Whether students are in the classroom or learning online, it is important for them to…

The Next Generation Science Standards lay out a model of energy that locates energy within objects and fields, and tracks energy as it transfers between these objects and transforms between forms of energy while always being conserved. This model of energy pervades much of modern science and represents a foundational, cross-cutting concept for…

The author introduces the Passive Dynamic Walker robot, which is constructed with LEGOs and operates without any electronics. Building this robot offers an excellent platform for investigating center of mass and other important physics and engineering concepts.

Mathematics is crucial to the educational and vocational success of students. The concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) approach is a method to teach students mathematical concepts. The CRA involves instruction with manipulatives, representations, and numbers only in different lessons (i.e., concrete lessons include manipulatives but not…

The use of interlocking toy building blocks (e.g., LEGO) as teaching modules with a focus on the topics in organic chemistry is presented. Interlocking building blocks were assembled on a baseplate to depict chemistry concepts of hydrogenation of alkenes, hydration of alkenes, Markovnikov's rule, cis and trans isomers, hydrogen bonding, optical…