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Output Devices, Computation, and the Future of Mathematical Crafts

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Abstract

This paper argues that the advent of powerful,affordable output devices offers the potential for a vastly expanded landscape of computationally-enriched mathematical craft activities in education. While mathematical crafts have a venerable history in classrooms, they have also suffered from a reputation of being both intellectually marginal and technologically retrograde. Nonetheless, this paper argues that craft activities have both intellectual and emotional affordances that are relatively lacking in `traditional' computer-based education; and that the combination of crafts and computation (facilitated by novel output devices and materials) can render such activities still more valuable. As springboards for discussion, the paper describes three software applications geared toward computational crafts (HyperGami, HyperSpider, and MachineShop). Each of these systems highlights its own particular set of issues relevant to the development of output technologies. Using these three systems as objects-to-think-with, the paper describes a wide variety of possible craft activities that could be invented or pursued in the near future with the aid of appropriately designed output devices.

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80309-0430, USA

    Michael Eisenberg

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Eisenberg, M. Output Devices, Computation, and the Future of Mathematical Crafts. International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning 7, 1–44 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016095229377

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