Using a large display in the periphery to support children learning through design

Learners benefit from creating personally meaningful artifacts for an audience, especially when those artifacts embody the concepts that the learners aim to understand. Our past work examined artistic design as an anchor for mathematical discussions between learners as they explored concepts like symmetry and fractions. In this paper, we present the work from two field studies where we explored ways to expand opportunities for mathematical discussions with a larger audience (beyond learners seated next to each other) by incorporating structured ways to share finished and in-progress work on a large display that all participants could view peripherally. We observed that the large display provided support for sharing designs with children anywhere in the room. The large display increased the students' awareness of their peers' designs, and the displayed designs became an anchor for their discussions. More work remains to increase the frequency of discussions about mathematical aspects of their artifacts.

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