Slime Time: Using Hourglasses During Play to Generate Representations of Elapsed Time

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 6
  In Poster Session: Mathematics Education Research Poster Session 2

Abstract

This paper reports a design experiment exploring how upper elementary students come to represent elapsed time—an intangible quantity with no spatial properties—as units of length. Four pairs of Grade 5 students participated in three sessions in which they played with slime for a duration of one of three hourglasses. Pairs generated and revised representations of the event. Results demonstrate how students represented various aspects of the event, including the amount of sand, the speed of the sand, the perceived size of the hourglass hole, and elapsed time. Through each session, students increasingly attended to elapsed time as a focal quantity.

Authors

• Darrell Earnest, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Alicia C. Gonzales, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Christine McGrail, University of Massachusetts - Amherst