Recommendations for Integrating Mathematics into Making and Tinkering Experiences

Making, tinkering, and other informal design and engineering experiences offer rich opportunities to engage children and adults in mathematics and build mathematical skills, knowledge, and interests. But how can educators successfully integrate mathematics into these experiences? One approach to answering this question is to better understand how children and adults engage with and think about mathematics outside of school, in every day and informal learning environments. As part of the NSF-funded Math in the Making project, Pattison, Rubin, and Wright (2016) synthesized the research on everyday and informal mathematics from the last several decades. The literature summary affirmed that children and adults regularly engage in mathematical thinking and reasoning outside of school. The summary also highlighted how this thinking often looks very different from classroom mathematics, is driven by different goals and motivations, and may go largely unrecognized as mathematical, by both educators and learners. Building on these findings, below we outline a series of recommendations for educators interested in leveraging the unique characteristics of everyday and informal math in order to successfully integrate mathematics into making and tinkering experiences. These recommendations will hopefully serve as useful and practical guidance for educators, as well as a foundation for much-needed research on mathematics in designed informal learning environments.

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