Texas Mathematics Teacher Spring/Summer 2020 - 19

Coding as a Platform for Mathematics
and Productive Struggle
Dr. Doug Rogers & Amanda Gardner

The Mathematics Teacher Academy (MTA) at Baylor
University is a collaborative professional development
experience focused on the National Council of Teachers
of Mathematics' (NCTM's) eight mathematics teaching
practices. Each year the three-day academy chooses
one NCTM practice to explore and crafts a curriculum
designed to help educators experience the practice firsthand, imagine how the practice would look in classroom
settings, and make plans to incorporate the practice in
their own classrooms.
One summer the MTA organized its curriculum around
NCTM's principle to "support productive struggle in
learning mathematics," which asserts that "effective
teaching of mathematics consistently provides students,
individually and collectively, with opportunities and
supports to engage in productive struggle as they grapple
with mathematical ideas and relationships" (NCTM, p. 3).
The experience described in this article incorporated
Arduino® coding to provide the platform through which
MTA participants would experience productive struggle
in relationship to mathematical concepts. Based on
local traffic light displays, the lesson revolves around
the mathematical concepts of proportionality and
percentages. Productive struggle is woven throughout
the experience as participants work in pairs to expand
minimal initial instructions to create a functioning model
of a local traffic light.

The video clips of local traffic lights were recorded
using a smartphone. It is important to capture the entire
red/yellow/green light cycles (though not necessarily
important to capture them in any particular sequence).
Including the street names or local landmarks in the
recordings provides learners with real-world connections
to the local community. Recording multiple traffic
lights creates variety in the experiences of the working
pairs, allows for repetition of the experience with
different outcomes, and provides multiple data points
for extending the learning experience in new ways.
The individual clips were made available on the local
computer lab server and were combined into a longer
video sequence that could be played as a loop at the
beginning of the experience.
The printed materials were created by the instructor from
resource material provided on the Arduino® website or in
the starter kit's manual.
 

Materials Required
The following materials, described in subsequent
paragraphs, supported the delivery of this experience:
* Vilros Arduino® Uno 3 Ultimate Starter Kit (one kit
per pair of learners)
* Pre-recorded video clips of multiple local traffic lights
* Access to the Arduino® programming environment
(https://arduino.cc)
* Copies of the following for each individual
o Build instructions for making one LED blink
(copied or created from kit manual; see Figure 1)
o Printed copies of the "Sketch" to make the LED
blink (the coded instructions that control the LED;
see Figure 2)
o Traffic Light Observation and Data Gathering
worksheet (see Figure 3)
While the activity described in this article used the Vilros
starter kit, Vilros is one of many available starter kits for
the Arduino; as long as each kit contains the appropriate
elements (Arduino circuit board, at least 1 red LED, 1
yellow LED, 1 green LED, and the appropriate wires and
resistors for connecting the Arduino to the bread board),
any starter kit should be sufficient.
www.txmathteachers.org

Figure 1. Build Instructions
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license visit:
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Spring/Summer 2020

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Texas Mathematics Teacher Spring/Summer 2020

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