Publications

Teaching Math and Geometry in particular follows a standard methodology of the Science education. Its main teaching problems are related to difficulties or misunderstanding of the learned content, its abstractedness, not enough real-life examples, and, as a result, low attractiveness. Geometry topics are presented using pure mathematical tasks, assuming that students know how to solve them. In general, this conclusion can be considered as inaccurate, not because students cannot solve the tasks, given to them, but because they do not distinguish the steps that lead from the "given" to "searched" and as a whole, they do not associate the solution with the real world. The incomprehension of the solution effect is often the main reason.

In this context, on the base of the high performance achieved by Asian Students as provided by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) international survey, this paper discusses a solution aiming to improve the Math understanding using Art. The proposed method makes a combination of the European and Asian (Singapore’s method) learning and teaching math approaches, and exploits the innovative potentialities gained from the integration of digital art management systems and science. We use the digital art libraries as sources for demonstrations of geometry knowledge. These systems present a wide range of real-life examples and show how the great artists creatively use the geometrical forms and objects to present more realistic human anatomy and architecture. This helps students revive the art perception displaying its hidden science base and understand that creators’ reasoning is reducible to mathematical concepts.

Keywords: Mathematics education, learning by doing, problem solving, inquiry-based learning, arts, technology-enhanced learning.

How to cite this paper:
Tramonti, M., & Paneva-Marinova, D. (2018). Towards improving Math Understanding using Digital Art Library as a source of Knowledge. INTED 2018 Proceedings, 2751-2756.