Middle-School Students’ Mathematical Sensemaking in Videogame Play

Abstract

Research demonstrates that the dominant but narrow definitions of mathematical activity in school limit students’ opportunity to make sense of mathematics and to use mathematics to make sense of the world. Video games have the potential to disrupt these narrow definitions, because in video games players are positioned as empowered learners who solve problems with understanding. Yet, this potential can be circumscribed by the inertia of inherited pedagogical forms, such as school worksheets and textbook word problems. This dissertation draws on the notion of frames of activity to examine the tensions between the potential of videogame media and the inertia of enduring pedagogical forms in broadening and constraining children’s mathematical sensemaking in educational videogame play. The first paper examines children’s mathematical sensemaking with and without the in-game problem-solving scaffold that resembled a school worksheet. This paper demonstrates that the familiar form of worksheet invited the frame for rote participation that shifted students away from the frame of mathematical sensemaking. The second paper examines two students who framed their videogame play differently, demonstrating how children’s mathematical sensemaking was recognizable and supported when their sensemaking aligned with the frame for school mathematics, but was invisible and unsupported when their sensemaking better aligned with the frame for videogame play. The third paper examines the limitations of using textbook word problems as initial prototypes in videogame designs for mathematics learning and proposes a potential redesign that centers and extends children’s mathematizing play.