DiMBI: An Interface to Connect People to Math's Big Ideas of Patterns and Relations

Abstract

Math education faces the challenge not only of how to teach math, but also of what math to teach. With the intention of promoting math's big ideas in formal and informal settings, we created DiMBI (Discovering Math's multimedia platform developed in Processing that uses reacTIVision to read users' interactions with selected tangible regular polygons (a triangle and a square). The corners of each polygon are linked with specific features that aim to promote transfer learning (colors and music). The features change as the user manipulates the objects through symmetric actions and permutation of corners. This is the first stage of our technology, which aims to bring big math ideas closer to the people, through more concrete interactions.