NSF Awards: 1943208
The Digital Math Storytelling project elicits student-created videos that showcase community, family, and household mathematics, in an attempt to connect at-home mathematics to in-school mathematics. In particular, Digital Math Stories focus on children from minoritized communities who often are not positioned as holding mathematics capital. The stories they share, the process of filming and editing their math stories, and the discussions they engage with as they watch each other's stories help center the children as holders of unique and complex mathematics knowledge.
Theodore Chao
Associate Professor
Hello. My name is Theodore Chao, I'm an associate professor at The Ohio State University. Dr. Melissa Adams-Corral, Dr. Ayse Ozturk, Ho-Chieh Lin, Angga Hidayat, Ruth Oliwe and I are at the beginning of exploring how children from urban emergent communities can use video storytelling to share about the mathematics in their world.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we shifted our approach from a school-based practice to working with local community centers and hosting our own digital math storytelling camps in Columbus, Ohio!
We're in the 2nd-year of a 5-year project and still figuring out how to support children in crafting, sharing, and refining mathematics stories that connect to their own community and family identities.
Let us know what you think. And please share any insight or questions you have about getting kids from the YouTube & TikTok generation to make math identity videos!
Chanda Jefferson
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ph.D. Candidate
Hello! My name is Ho-Chieh Lin. I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University. I am also a graduate research associate of this project. I have enjoyed working with children in uncovering their math stories that connect with their identities. My dissertation study also involves children producing math videos and aims to understand how they communicate their mathematical ideas around the videos. Feel free to contact me if you would like to learn more about our DMS project or my study. :)
Chanda Jefferson
Ho-Chieh Lin
Theodore Chao
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ph.D. Candidate
Hello again! So glad you come here to check our work. Hope you are inspired by our project. If you have a math story that happened in your recent life. Feel free to leave it here as a textual comment. We would love to hear it!
Jennifer Suh
Dr. Chao- I love the digital math storytelling as a way to build a strong relationship and connection to problem solving :) and the world we live in!!! Story Circles for our young digital natives make this a wonderful form of representing their knowledge of math :) I can't wait to connect with some of the digital artifacts and share with our teachers.... I always loved when kids told me their math happenings over the weekend - I would love to have them use this model to tell their math happenings! Thanks for the inspirations! Do you have a website where you are archiving these digital math stories?
Ho-Chieh Lin
Theodore Chao
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ph.D. Candidate
Hi Prof. Suh,
I read and cited your paper about virtual manipulatives!! This is Ho-Chieh Lin, a GRA on this project. Thank you for leaving the first comment! Glad to know you would like to use this model and share that with your teachers! Here is the link where you can find amazing stories the participants made: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHMCoq0Q-0A8.... Let us know if you have other inspirations! :)
Theodore Chao
Theodore Chao
Associate Professor
Thanks for coming by, Jennifer! We are so inspired by your work, especially in connecting mathematical modeling with community mathematics knowledge! Ho-Chieh just shared a link to our YouTube channel. We also have a website that is in transition that shares out some of what we're doing. Let's connect more about how our work overlaps!
https://u.osu.edu/digitalmathstorytelling/
Ho-Chieh Lin
Sally Crissman
Senior Science Educator
Having recently watched a child 11 year old try to solve a VERY difficult "word problem" featuring fractions. I would love to have seen her create her own math story rooted in her everyday life. I think remote learning during the pandemic showed us that video can motivate kids to look thoughtfully into all kinds of content. I love the image in your video of the story circle - a community of math awareness!
Are you probing how these math stories connect to classroom math experiences?
I look forward to watching the discussion of your project unfold.
Ho-Chieh Lin
Theodore Chao
Theodore Chao
Associate Professor
Thanks for the comments, Sally. I appreciate this feedback. Fraction stories can be so magical and meaningful. But it pains me so much when I watch children have to do word problems with seemingly random fractions inserted in, with signals that finding the lowest common denominator is the strategy to use, rather than allowing children to think about where fractions and other rational numbers live in their own world. We've had a lot of fun getting students to create math stories around how the actually share things with each other and learned from the video stories that children do not always share in ways that all children get the same amount, but rather, each child gets what they feel is fair.
In regards to the classroom math experiences, we're still trying to figure that out. During this past year, our school partners expressed that they were overwhelmed with just trying to support their communities, so we decided to stick with after-school and community-centered work. But we might connect with teachers again to see how this work connects with classroom experiences in the near future.
Ho-Chieh Lin
Daniel Damelin
Senior Scientist
It was great to have kid voices in the video, they seem pretty interested in looking at math from a storytelling perspective. Can you provide some examples of the kinds of math stories kids develop during the summer camps?
Do you see an overlap between stories based on math vs. stories based on exploring data? There are some interesting projects out there with a focus on data stories. Perhaps there are some synergies with that work and this project.
Ho-Chieh Lin
Theodore Chao
Theodore Chao
Associate Professor
Thanks for the insight, Daniel. Yes, the stories that children told were pretty amazing. Often, they centered around an actual story or event, such as a family trip, a traumatic experience, or someone in their community that inspired them. And as the children shared these stories in their storycircles, their peers helped them see where they math naturally comes up.
So far, we haven't seen any math stories that focus specifically on data. We had some that connected loosely to data stories, such as figuring out the likelihood of getting a $2 bill or figuring out the likelihood of your bus or plane being delayed. But I do see the potential of asking students to think about data or patterns they notice as the basis for their stories.
Daniel Damelin
Ho-Chieh Lin
Patti Parson
Great for kids to see math is embedded in their every day life and to bring that forward through stories. I think the challenge to make a Tiktok type video of their math life is a great one! One question remains--did she make 8 out of 10 baskets ;)
Ho-Chieh Lin
Theodore Chao
Theodore Chao
Associate Professor
Thanks for this, Patti. Yes, TikTok has definitely gotten a lot of children (and adults) ready to make quick, catchy videos! And yes, the math discussions we all had as we counted how many baskets she made as she inched towards 80% was amazing!
Ho-Chieh Lin
Denice Blair
Nice project! I love the idea of connecting participants' own stories with math. It seems like a great way for getting learners interested and invested.
Ho-Chieh Lin
Theodore Chao
Theodore Chao
Associate Professor
Thank you, Denise!
Eva Thanheiser
WOW what a cool project ... I wonder whether we can incorporate some of that into our work?
Ho-Chieh Lin
Theodore Chao
Theodore Chao
Associate Professor
Thanks, Eva! Yes! I wonder what might happen in your work if you give a kid a device to make a video story about the math they're doing.
Ho-Chieh Lin
Mary Alice Carlson
So great to see you, Teddy! I'm also thinking about connections to my Montana Models project. We are working on expanding the ways students might tell their stories. This is really inspiring! Thanks so much for sharing your work!
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ph.D. Candidate
Thank you for the comment, Prof. Carlson. Your Montana Models project is inspiring too! I look forward to hearing how your students tell their stories in beautiful Montana!
Laura Santhanam
I love the concept and execution of this project. Stories surround us all the time. We simply have to pay attention. That truth is certain present in math, and this project opens an avenue to help kids engage and be creative while they learn. Fantastic!
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ph.D. Candidate
Thank you for the comment, Laura! Glad you love our project!
Chanda Jefferson
Educator/Education Policy Fellow
Hi my name is Chanda Jefferson and I am so happy to join the conversation! Thank you for sharing about your project. I like the storytelling aspect of this project and when students are given the opportunity to take ownership of their learning they create masterpieces. I am a biology teacher and growing up I experienced “math trauma”. I made it through math by memorizing steps, as opposed to learning and developing a deep understanding of foundational mathematics concepts. I would like to know how mathematics teachers can use some of your strategies in the classroom? Were you able to reach more students when you transitioned from the school settings to community centers? Students love making videos, so this project is definitely a game changer for the future of math pedagogical practices. Love this!
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ph.D. Candidate
Hi Chanda, Thank you for sharing your math story. Many people experienced math trauma as well, but everyone went through it differently. I believe what math means to you now must be very different. Thank you for the great questions. So far, we have developed online PD for teachers. We will upload more info about this to our website: https://u.osu.edu/digitalmathstorytelling/ Also, we plan to promote this practice in school settings in the near future.
Anne-Marie Núñez
Hi Teddy, Ho-Chieh, and the math storytelling team! It is great to see the work that you are doing to engage students in math early on in their educations. The digital storytelling approach seems especially important in the COVID-19 era, and I look forward to hearing more about how you develop this innovation. Thanks for this critical work.
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ph.D. Candidate
Thank you so much for the nice comments, Prof. Nunez! Glad you like our project :)
Abigail Helsinger
Great project! Thanks for sharing it!
Ho-Chieh Lin
Ph.D. Candidate
Thank you Abigail! Glad you came to learn about our project!
Ruth Oliwe
Hello,
I am Ruth Oliwe. I am a member of the Digital Math Storytelling Team working with Dr. Theodore Chao at The Ohio State University.
Thank you all for stopping by to learn more about our Digital Math storytelling project and sharing your thoughts with us. We are glad that you find our project interesting and particularly useful in helping kids learn and know more about math in a fun and creative way.
We are excited about working on this project and it's been an amazing journey so far. We look forward to sharing more of our works with you all.
Thank you.
Jeremy Roschelle
Nice to see what you are up to, Teddy.
Theodore Chao
Jessica Hunt
What wonderful work that empowers students to see themselves in math and its beauty! I am big fan of this work. Thank you for sharing your story.
Theodore Chao
Dorothy Bennett
I love this! It is really important to make those connections between mathematics and real life, and storytelling is a wonderful and meaningful mechanism for doing that. In fact, I would love to connect to find out more about what you are doing and how it might relate to past development work I was involved in at NYSCI funded by the Gates Foundation. Referred to as Noticing Tools, we created a suite of apps for Ipads that allow kids to make mathematics discoveries in the context of creating compelling digital design projects-- from forced perspective photography to animated stories that also make use math like coordinate grids and fractions as tools to make your creations. We conducted a small implementation study with English Language Learners that gives a picture of what they can do. I felt that the tools were most powerful when storytelling was a component of what kids did with them. This video might be useful. For ELLs, it really extended the math discourse that children engaged in and gave teachers a real sense of the children's mathematical thinking. No need to comment now, but would love to hear your thoughts if there are any chances for synergies to work together in the future! In another vein, I am curious what you are planning to do to assess any changes in students' understanding of math concepts and practices and how their construct of what mathematics changes as a result of participation.
Jillian Orr
Fabulous project! Incredibly important for valuing the uniqueness of each individual in our society and for emphasizing that relationship of one's unique self with mathematics. Love it! Excited to learn more from you, Teddy and Ho-Chieh!