In 2020, the emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic brought a drastic and sudden change in teaching practices, from the physical space of the classrooms to the virtual space of an e-environment. In this paper, through a qualitative analysis of 44 collected essays composed by Italian mathematics teachers from primary school to undergraduate level during the spring of 2020, we investigate how the Italian teachers perceived the changes due to the unexpected transition from a face-to-face setting to distance education. The analysis is carried out through a double theoretical lens, one concerning the whole didactic system where the knowledge at stake is mathematics and the other regarding affective aspects. The integration of the two theoretical perspectives allows us to identify key elements and their relations in the teachers’ narratives and to analyze how teachers have experienced and perceived the dramatic, drastic, and sudden change. The analysis shows the process going from the disruption of the educational setting to the teachers’ discovery of key aspects of the didactic system including the teacher’s roles, a reflection on mathematics and its teaching, and the attempt to reconstruct the didactic system in a new way.

This paper focus on how language can be seen as an object to be manipulated and how manipulation can act as scaffolding for fostering argumentative competency. To this aim, we have defined a digital toolkit, consisting in virtual “language tiles”, made available to the students. The learners can freely articulate their thinking, drag the appropriate tiles in order build sentences for communicating her findings and arguments. The toolkit can also allow automatic assessment of the sentences. We analyse from a theoretical point of view the didactical potential of the toolkit for supporting cognitive process, activating mathematical knowledge and favouring the passage from reasoning, as production of arguments, to expression of arguments, towards construction of formal proof.

This paper aims to show how the Logic of Game Theory can facilitate the structuring of games for the learning of mathematical concepts, in a way which is cognitively resonant with students’ attitudes and epistemologically sound from the mathematical standpoint. We propose a kind of game, based on an inquiry approach to mathematics, called Digital Inquiry Game (DIG), the aim of which is to foster students’ positive beliefs about their mathematical capabilities with regards to problem solving and to improve the way students are able to grasp the epistemic aspects of the mathematical knowledge in question. The main issues surrounding the theoretical background and the inspiring key constructs of the DIG are explained. The design of a DIG is validated through a case study concerning some properties of integers and a general divisibility criterion. Finally, some issues for further researches are considered.

Introduction: This exploratory study investigates the potentials of social robots as an inclusive educational technology to enhance mathematics learning. Methodology: More specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of the social robot Pepper in engaging students in inclusive didactic activities through storytelling and providing them with immediate, personalized and emotional feedback. Our focus is on integrating innovative artificial intelligence (AI) with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. The research sample consisted of five students, engaging with Pepper in inclusive mathematics sessions. Results: Our results suggest that the use of Pepper significantly increases student engagement by providing them personalized support. Discussions: The robot’s capacity for dynamic and empathetic student interaction creates a more stimulating and encouraging learning environment. Conclusions: This study shows the potential of social robots in inclusive education, especially when it comes to enabling tailored learning experiences for students in mathematics education that adapt to their various needs. The results of this study need to be validated through future research involving more participants over a long period of time

This article is part of a wider research project that has the educational goal of supporting students in the production of conjectures, arguments and proofs, as well as promoting a move from the production of arguments expressed in colloquial registers to arguments expressed in literate registers. In this regard, we Giovannina Albano, Umberto Dello Iacono and Maria Alessandra Mariotti designed and implemented a digital educational environment that allows students to formulate and prove conjectures; three different working areas are available where students can work on a geometrical open problem sometimes individually, sometimes in collaboration. In this article, I report on an empirical study aimed at investigating the functioning of one of these areas, the ‘Working with others’ area, where small groups of students are expected to discuss and formulate a shared solution to a problem. The research question concerns if and to what extent the communication tools, specifically designed to foster students’ collaboration, can promote the production of mathematically acceptable arguments. The qualitative data analysis shows that the ‘Working with others’ area seems to foster discussion within the group and can make students aware of their mistakes. Moreover, it can bring out some students’ misconceptions and can provide useful information upon which the teacher can trigger fruitful discussions. However, this working area does not appear to foster a significant improvement of the production of mathematically acceptable arguments, produced by students in a collaborative and sharing mode. The integration of specific components within this working area seems to be necessary to support the student in moving from argumentation to proof.