Drawings, Gestures and Discourses: A Case Study with Kindergarten Students Discovering Lego Bricks

Abstract

This paper presents a study aimed at investigating the didactic potentiality of the use of an artefact, useful to construct mathematical meanings concerning the coordination of different points of view, in the observation of a real object/toy. In our view, the process of meaning construction can be fostered by the use of adequate artefacts, but it requires a teaching/learning model, which explicitly takes care of the evolution of meanings, from those personal, emerging through the activities, to the mathematical ones, aims of the teaching intervention. The main hypothesis of this study is that the alternation between different semiotic systems, graphical system, verbal system and system of gestures, can determine the evolution of the learning objectives, that are the coordination of different points of view. The Theory of Semiotic Mediation offers the theoretical framework suitable to design the teaching sequence and to analyze the collected data. The study involved 15 Kindergarten students, (5 or 6 years old) in which we asked children to represent a Lego block and discuss drawings observed from different points of view.