The mathematical ideas involved in Maranao Weaving

Abstract

Weaving is an art. It portrays the unique identity of the maker. It allures everyone seeing it. It is rich of mathematical ideas that reveal the creativity and critical thinking of the maker. This is what the teachers, school administrators, and curriculum planners want to develop to the students. Why not integrating it in the mathematics curriculum? Students of different levels of skills will have interest and fun in doing the activity like Maranao Kararawhile they are learning. They will be challenged to explore those concepts. Weaving activity will help solve many of the existing educational problems among students like valuing different cultures and application of concepts in reality. This qualitative study presents the mathematical ideas explored in Karara designs of Maranao. There were 5 participants involved who were native Maranaos and whose ages ranges from 40 to 55 years old. Purposive sampling was employed for selecting the participants while interviews and observations were used to gather the data. These were recorded in audio. The mathematical concepts discovered by the researcher in the preparation, process, and designs of Karara are symmetries, congruency, patterns, counting, and estimation. The different geometric shapes contained in Karara designs are triangles, squares, rectangles, and other quadrilaterals. The results of the study illustrated equal computations of perimeters and areas of the involved shapes using the traditional estimation and the mathematical formulas taught in school. This study recommended that mathematics teachers, educators, and curriculum makers should use lessons with ethnomathematics activities because it provides rich and interesting concepts that can be discovered by the learners.