Using Digital Fabrication to Support Student Learning

Abstract Desktop digital fabrication technologies provide students with access to concrete and virtual manipulatives, which have both been identified as useful instructional tools to support student learning in a variety of different content areas, such as mathematics. In particular, these technologies can be used to help support students' development of conceptual understandings of three-dimensional measurement. This article describes how a digital fabrication-augmented unit supported the teaching and learning of surface area. Our goal was to see how working with both virtual and concrete manipulatives affected students' development of strategies to use when solving surface area tasks. Fifth-grade students used modeling software and die cutters to print physical models (three-dimensional cubes and rectangular prisms) from digital designs, giving them access to virtual and physical manipulatives. There was substantial pretest–posttest improvement on students' performance on surface area tasks following their participation in the digital fabrication-augmented unit. Additionally, features of the software and the unit supported students' development of two strategies: (1) being aware of nonobservable faces of prisms in two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional figures and (2) keeping track of their work.