Analyzing Tools: Perspectives on the Role of Designed Artifacts in Mathematics Learning

Abstract

In the short story from which the preceding quotation is taken, Italo Calvino’s thoughtful character, Mr. Palomar, is watching sea waves and is reflecting on the experience. In the constant quest for understanding, Mr. Palomar is never fully satisfied with what he already has managed to see. His looking is not a passive absorption of visual signals, nor is it considered as completed when a single wave has been described in finest details. Although successful in drawing the picture, Calvino’s protagonist also realizes that “isolating one wave is not easy” (p. 3) and that “you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates” (p. 4). In a series of strenuous trials, Mr. Palomar manages to create for himself a rich collection of pictures, each of which is quite meaningful in its own right, but none of which can be considered as telling the story of the waves unless taken together with THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 11(2&3), 153–161 Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

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