One task of the CoLabs project is to create open learning space for discovering mathematics - for and by children aged 8 to 12. We decided to develop it as an open authoring environment for building and discovering essential concepts and relations in the area of factions. This is our attempt to constract a kind of new culture in modern "tangible mathematics" education by providing teachers and children with highly interactive sets of visual building blocks which can be combined and explored.
Our visual building blocks present different representations of fractions and relations among them. The environment allows children to combine these visual tangible objects and thus model and explore dependecies between fractions. We believe that the Visual fractions environment offers new approach to modern mathematics education built on collaboration and exploration.
Children or their teacher can use different visual representations of fractions, they can specify dependencies between them, they can apply operations like + etc., or logical relations like <, = etc. (Ivan Kalas).
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