Helping students relate to maths is a challenge for primary schools through to universities, but can a solution be found in patterns made by animals in beach sand and the bark of Australia’s Scribbly Gum trees?
The answer is yes, according to University of the Sunshine Coast academics in a paper published today in the International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology.
Lead author, UniSC Senior Lecturer Dr Greg Watson said maths and science educators across the world could use visual cues in nature – like animal trails and patterns – to explore simple to complex mathematical concepts with students.
“Mathematics is one of those disciplines where students can often find a disconnect between what they are taught and their own experiences. This sometimes relates to lack of real-world examples to illustrate how it can be applied in the everyday,” he said.
“We are recommending educators take cues from nature to adopt a new visual approach to help students from primary school to tertiary level engage and understand subjects such as mathematics, biology, ecology and animal behaviour."
"We use real-life examples of the way some organisms physically move through their environment to illustrate the connection of mathematics to the natural world and explain a variety of mathematical functions, such as sinusoidal curves and triangular wave functions,” he said.
“For example, the curving patterns that a small beach clam (Paphies altenai) leaves as it moves under the sand with a falling tide offer a wonderful opportunity to visualise how subtle changes to the various parameters, variables and boundaries affect the shapes of the curves.”
Australia’s ionic scribbly gums could also become a new teaching tool in the classroom.
“The patterns that the larvae of scribbly moth (Ogmograptis spp) leave as they burrow into the new bark, not only help to give the trees their name, but images of the trail they leave can be used to teach interesting triangular wave functions,” he said.
“There are numerous wormlike species called nematodes which inhabit the sandy beaches in Australia, and we’ve observed many hundreds of their trails of various lengths, amplitude and wavelengths as they move through the sand above beach tidal zones.
“Fossils of nematode trails have been discovered at various locations across the world that educators can also use these images for students to apply sinusoidal functions to express the organism’s trail motion.”
Co-author, UniSC Senior Lecturer in Science, Dr Jolanta Watson said the content they had developed expanded the choices for educators to teach mathematics.
“Relating mathematical functions to living organisms allows them to easily adapt or change features, such as inclusion of time dependent studies such as calculating the time it takes to make a trail by inclusion of an assumed organism velocity,” Dr Watson said.
“Examples and images of animal trails could be easily incorporated into future textbook editions in a variety of subjects, exposing school students and undergraduates to the applications of mathematical modelling within current and cutting-edge research in fields such as animal ecology, biophysics and biomechanics.”
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