Talk Title: Embodied Design Principles for Mathematical Reasoning

Speaker: Mitchell Nathan, Professor of Learning Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Location: HCIL Lab (HBK 2105) and Zoom

Abstract: Consider the role your body plays the next time you find yourself gesturing to explain a complex idea or adjusting your wrist before you pick up a wrench to remove a bolt. Our bodies are obviously instrumental in performing actions and getting things done. They are also essential to how people think, learn, teach, and express what they know to others. My aim is to inform designers, educators, and researchers about the ways embodiment fosters conceptual reasoning and learning, even in very complex and abstract domains, and why dissociations from embodied resources impairs intellectual performance.

For this presentation, I will focus on high school and college-level geometric reasoning and mathematical proof. I present findings synthesized across multiple empirical studies that converge on several embodied design principles for promoting mathematical reasoning. I show how these principles are instantiated in the design of embodied video games that foster conceptual reasoning about abstract ideas through movement-based interactions. Embodied design principles offer promising avenues for promoting cognitive performance, they help explain why some intellectual topics are inherently difficult for people, and why some forms of human thinking are likely to remain out of reach for current Large Language Models (LLMs) that are fundamentally disembodied.

Bio: Mitchell J. Nathan, BSEE, Ph.D., is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Learning Sciences, in the Educational Psychology Department in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with affiliate appointments in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction, and the Department of Psychology. Dr. Nathan is Chair of the Learning Science program and Principal Investigator in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), and is a Fellow and Founding Officer of the International Society of the Learning Sciences. Dr. Nathan is an inductee of the University of Wisconsin’s Teaching Academy, which promotes excellence in teaching in higher education, and served on its executive board. He is one of the founding members of EMIC, an international group of scholars and educators focused on embodied mathematical imagination and cognition. Professor Nathan is Director of the MAGIC Lab, where he and the members of his lab study how people think, teach, and learn, with particular emphasis on the role that language, gestures, and embodied processes plays in mathematical reasoning and the construction of meaning for formal systems that are used to model mathematical and physical phenomena, such as algebraic teaching and learning, mathematical proof, and engineering design.