Effective teaching with technology: Managing affordances in iPad apps to promote young children’s mathematics learning

This paper contributes new insights on young children’s use of virtual manipulative mathematics touch-screen apps. We conducted clinical interviews with 35 young children to capture changes in their counting skills. The results focus on changes observed in children’s learning progressions during the interview and the app affordances related to those changes. The results show that there were differences in the access of affordances based on age, that most children’s counting skills stayed the same during the interview, and that it was not the affordance itself but the way the child accessed it that impacted their learning.