Coding Dancing Figural Animations: Mathematical Meaning-Making Through Transitions Within and Beyond a Digital Resource

We investigate three 8th-grade students’ mathematical meanings developed in the context of using linked representations to generate animations of figural models tuned in musical rhythm in “MaLT2,” a programmable Turtle Geometry in 3D resource affording dynamic manipulation of variable values. We adopted a modified version of the UDGS (Using, Discriminating, Generalizing, Synthesizing) model, introduced by Hoyles and Noss in 1987, in order to frame and analyze students’ mathematical meaning-making process involving setting out goals; posing conjectures; using mathematical ideas to test them; and exploring, generalizing, and expanding these ideas. This dynamic process was contextualized and connected to a flow of two different types of transitions: (1) transitions within the different representations of MaLT2 and (2) transitions beyond MaLT2, among the representational contexts of the digital microworld, artistic ideas, and abstract mathematics. In our analysis, we use this theoretical concept to trace the kind of mathematical meanings connected to multidisciplinary notions embedded in dance and music, such as synchronicity, symmetry, periodicity, and harmony, emerging from this learning context. We also look into the way these mathematical meanings were gradually evolved from being implicitly integrated in digital and artistic ideas to being reflected on and generalized.