screen offer the potential for movement to be brought into mathematical representations
and the engagement of students’ via interaction with the elements on screen.
Mathematics involves the selection and representation of elements of everyday
phenomena that are significant to the interests of the subject, in the case of the example
discussed in this thesis these elements are ‘rule’, ‘movement’, directionality’, ‘action’,
‘condition’ and ‘agency’. In the move from the facilities of the page to the screen the
concept of rule is transformed from a written and numerical sequence to a multimodal
and multi-directional representation. The computer application discussed in the thesis,
Toontalk, draws on the realism of the sensory∕everyday cartoon world of young children
to represent mathematical concepts as applicable to the social world (represented via the
cityscape of the programming environment). At a more complex programming level
within the application a scientific (technical) realism is also present. The potential to
‘move between’ these two representations of the world and the domain of mathematics
enables the students to make connections between their knowledge of the everyday world
and the mathematical concepts that underpin the programming environment.
The move from the traditional resources of the Science classroom (e.g. textbooks,
models, demonstration and investigation) to the multimodal representation of the medium
of the screen offer new potentials for the representation of curriculum entities which
transform the ways in which everyday (naturalistic) realism and scientific (technical)
realism are realised. In the case of the curriculum entity ‘particles’, focused on in this
thesis, for example, traditional textbooks represent the ‘realism’ of the everyday world
and the ‘realism’ of scientific theory visually as two distinct, separate constructions.
Similarly in classroom interaction the entity ‘particles’ is represented in two distinct
ways, via the realism of the everyday, through examples of a solid, liquid, and a gas
(sometimes shown, but often ‘talked into existence’) and via the scientific realism of
image, gesture, and the teacher’s use of models. The multimodal resources of the screen,
in particular image, colour and movement, together with the facilities of the medium
(more specifically interactivity and the links and structures of screen texts) afford the
potential for everyday realism and scientific realism to be configured newly through their
simultaneous presence on screen. In the case of the CD-ROM discussed in this thesis, the
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