This unique volume presents an ecocultural and embodied perspective on understanding numbers and their history in indigenous communities. The book focuses on research carried out in Papua New Guinea and Oceania, and will help educators understand humanity's use of numbers, and their development and change. The authors focus on indigenous mathematics education in the early years and shine light on the unique processes and number systems of non-European styled cultural classrooms. This new perspective for mathematics education challenges educators who have not heard about the history of...

This book brings together 10 experiments which introduce historical perspectives into mathematics classrooms for 11 to 18-year-olds. The authors suggest that students should not only read ancient texts, but also should construct, draw and manipulate. The different chapters refer to ancient Greek, Indian, Chinese and Arabic mathematics as well as to contemporary mathematics. Students are introduced to well-known mathematicians--such as Gottfried Leibniz and Leonard Euler--as well as to less famous practitioners and engineers. Always, there is the attempt to associate the experiments with...

In this well-illustrated book the authors, Sinan Kanbir, Ken Clements, and Nerida Ellerton, tackle a persistent, and universal, problem in school mathematics--why do so many middle-school and secondary-school students find it difficult to learn algebra well? What makes the book important is the unique features which comprised the design-research approach that the authors adopted in seeking a solution to the problem.

The first unique feature was that the authors offered a historical overview of the history of school algebra. Despite the fact that algebra has been an important...