Touching Numbers and Feeling Quantities: Methodological Dimensions of Working with TouchCounts

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss a classroom-based intervention that we carried out with a group of first grade children using a multi-touch iPad application called TouchCounts, as part of a research project aimed at developing children's number sense. We situate our work within an inclusive materialist approach to the study of mathematics education (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014), which maps the various materialities at work in the mathematics classroom, as a way to attend to the relational entanglement of numbers, iPad and learners. Drawing on this vision, we analyse the methodological dimensions of using TouchCounts, conceptualising the application as an experimental means that allows us to better see methodological implications as they sustain mathematical encounters for learners. We investigate how event-like interventions emerge out of the material relations with the surrounding and engender new kinds of mathematical experiences with number. We focus particularly on a situation in which the number of children around a table became the variable under discussion providing the basis for emerging relational meanings of number.