Changing the curriculum script: teaching line symmetry in a digital environment

In this study, a set of activities on line symmetry in the Geometer’s Sketchpad environment, published on the Canadian website http://www.sfu.ca/geometry4yl.html, were adapted by two Italian researchers for 1st and 2nd grade classes with an Interactive White Board (IWB) in the classroom. The activities were proposed to a 2nd grade during two lessons conducted by one of the researchers, that were video-recorded. The videos were passed to 3 teachers who then proposed the same activities in their 1st and 2nd grade classes. The study was carried out over a 6-month period, with the aim of studying 1) Italian children’s responses to the activities and the emergence of attention towards mathematical properties of line symmetry; 2) the process of change undertaken by the set of activities, conceived as a boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989); 3) teachers’ implementation of the activities and reflection upon the close interaction they had with the researchers involved on issues including the design of the digital objects in the activities. This poster discusses aspects of aim 3; in particular, the changes in structuring features (Ruthven, 2011) of teachers’ lessons on line symmetry before and during this experience.