TAYLOR DIETMEIER: MIDTERM PAPER

Midterm Paper

ELPS 811

The Geometer’s Sketchpad

Taylor Dietmeier

Kansas University
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Abstract

This paper is a critique from the position of a learner of The Geometer’s Sketchpad, a

mathematics technology for academic use. The Geometer’s Sketchpad is critiqued and analyzed

with respect to cognitive load theory, human cognitive architecture, constructivism, social

constructivism, and constructionism. The main conclusions of this paper reveal that The

Geometer’s Sketchpad is a constructivist technology, also known as an object-to-think-with. The

paper also discusses a potential for learning through Project Based Learning and Inquiry

Learning. For The Geometer’s Sketchpad to be successful as a constructivist tool, it requires

significant scaffolding.
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The Geometer’s Sketchpad is an award-winning mathematics visualization software and

is one of the most widely-used educational technologies in mathematics in the world. One of the

awards that The Geometer’s Sketchpad has received is the ComputED award for the best

educational software in the category of high school math tools (“The Sketchpad Story”, 2014).

In other words, according to the education world, there is no greater recommendation for

mathematical technology than The Geometer’s Sketchpad.

The program was originally designed in 1980 by the Visual Geometry Project at

Swarthmore College under Drs. Eugene Klotz and Doris Schattschneider, and the first completed

program was called Ivan Sutherland’s 1963 SKETCHPAD (Sutherland, 1963). In the early 90’s

it was recognized for its educational potential with respect to mathematical visualization,

generalization, conjecturing, and problem-solving (“The Sketchpad Story”, 2014). Today it is

used across schools in the United States and abroad to help students visualize and understand

geometry through creation and manipulation.

The Geometer’s Sketchpad is essentially a geometry drawing software program. It

doesn’t ask questions or give hints. Upon first glance, the sketchpad resembles the old Paint

program found on Windows computers. A user can easily choose a tool to draw and select lines

and shapes. With those shapes, a user can choose a variety of commands like rotations,

reflections, and other transformations. In addition, a user can create chords, arcs, intersecting

circles and shapes, and more. Other options include area, perimeter, angle measurements, and

circumference. Many instructors use The Geometer’s Sketchpad so students can easily see the

changes in figures when they are manipulated. The program can be used for physics, projectiles

in algebra, and statistics; however, the program is most often used for geometry.
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According to research, it really does help students succeed in mathematics. Research by

Battista (2002), Hollebrands (2007), Frekering (1994), and Sinclair (2006) all found that

Sketchpad has positively impacted student achievement, and in some cases has increased

conceptual understanding, motivation, and engagement. Numerous CEO’s in the Silicon Valley

have recommended The Geometer’s Sketchpad, and the company has expanded to multiple

countries around the world (“The Sketchpad Story”, 2014).

I didn’t know any of this information before my geometry course at the University of

North Carolina in Chapel Hill in undergraduate school. Our professor, whose name I’ll never

remember, required each of us to purchase the program and download it on our computers. I was

hesitant at best about the program, and I certainly wasn’t pleased that we had to purchase it.

Nonetheless, within a matter of a few clicks, I had The Geometer’s Sketchpad on my computer

and was about to embark on a journey that would help me understand geometry more deeply.

I don’t remember many details regarding the course, the syllabus, or the specific

conjectures, but I remember immediately writing off the professor, the software program, and the

very idea of the course. By this time, I had already taken up to Calculus 3, Linear Algebra, and

Differential Equations. Yet for some reason, I needed to take a geometry class which was

required for the math education track. Like a typical millennial, I had assumed and was vocal

about the fact that my previously learned geometry skills were absolutely fine. Unfortunately, I

was wrong, and The Geometer’s Sketchpad helped me realize that I actually lacked much of the

reasoning I needed in order to truly understand most of the conjectures.

There were several uses for the program during my course in undergraduate school. We

were first told to explore and spend time figuring it out. I did, and it was interesting, but I didn’t

learn – or try to learn – anything I didn’t already know. I had this same experience during the
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exploration of LOGO in this course. I enjoyed entering a few rules, drawing a few shapes, etc.

but I didn’t actually learn new rules for geometry. The lack of objective or task did not motivate

me to learn anything new. It reminded me of Kirschner’s paper (2006) which states, “Although

unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively

appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute

human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century and

consistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than

instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning

process.”

After a few days of exploration, our professor gave us a step-by-step worksheet where we

were told what to do, and we filled in a few explanations. Again, there wasn’t anything new – I

could have responded to the questions without the program – but I believe my professor was

attempting to scaffold the learning experience to prepare us for more challenging tasks.

Effective scaffolding, according to Vygotsky’s social constructivism, includes maintaining

attention and engagement by taking in prior knowledge and experience, giving immediate

feedback, and giving verbal cues and prompts to emphasize concepts. The teacher’s role is to

enable the students to take ownership by providing scaffolding and support.

And then, what seemed like suddenly, I found myself halfway through a problem feeling

frustrated, annoyed, and challenged. And just like that, I was in my ZPD.

ZPD is the Zone of Proximal Development, which Lev Vygotsky termed in 1978 to be

the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem

solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under

adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers. The biggest clue that I was in my
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ZPD was that I had reached a level of frustration or challenge. Up to that point in my life, I

thought that I had learned everything that there was to learn about geometry. It had always been

easy and boring. Reaching frustration, supplemented with support and scaffolding, kept my

attention and interest in the given task.

Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development has a few key characteristics in

addition to maintaining the level of frustration. These characteristics include but are not limited

to a “more knowledgeable other” and group diversity within collaborative learning. In my case,

my professor was my more knowledgeable other, and he gave us just the right amount of “boost”

– or scaffolding – to achieve the tasks on The Geometer’s Sketchpad. Although there were

certainly moments where I wanted to quit, the task itself was interesting, and I knew my

professor would give us hints if I needed one. I truly believe his support within the use of the

technology was what made it a successful educational tool. In addition, our professor certainly

implemented Vygotsky’s theory by arranging groups with great diversity in ability in an effort to

combine advanced peers with less advanced members to motivate everyone’s zone of proximal

development (McLeod, 2010).

Our class was much like a Project-Based Learning environment. According to Hmelo-

Silver’s response to Krischner’s argument (2006) about unstructured instruction, facilitators of

PBL environments emphasize the aspects of expertise by modeling, coaching, and eventually

fading some of their support. Our professor started with easy tasks with significant modeling

and gradually released us from support by giving tasks to complete on The Geometer’s

Sketchpad with a few different guidelines and questions to stretch our understanding of the

concept.
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Our professor aimed for us to be absolute experts in geometry. He wanted us to think

deeply about geometric concepts, being able to categorize them with sound reasoning and to

problem-solve effectively and efficiently. Experts, as opposed to novices, can notice meaningful

patterns and retain content knowledge in an organized manner.

The Geometer’s Sketchpad helps expand the types of questions students can investigate

by drawing, comparing, and manipulating several geometric shapes and ideas. The Geometer’s

Sketchpad could be used in a manner similar to Inquiry Learning, which allows for model

building and scientific reasoning, with the support of scaffolded learning (Hmelo-Silver, 2007).

It is important to note that The Geometer’s Sketchpad is nearly completely ineffective without

proper support. Someone must write scaffolded curriculum and a facilitator must monitor

learner frustration in order for The Geometer’s Sketchpad to be an effective tool to guide

students to true expertise.

Looking back, it is quite obvious that our professor’s intentions were to get us to truly

investigate and discover geometric conjectures through constructivism. He essentially used The

Geometer’s Sketchpad as an object-to-think-with. Seymour Papert created the term “object-to-

think-with” within the theory of constructivism. The object he is referring to is anything that can

help a student better understand abstract information. They are intended to further extend and

deepen ideas and concepts. This particular object-to-think-with, The Geometer’s Sketchpad,

allowed us to quickly make drawings, manipulate figures, and apply transformations so that we

could spend more time considering the conjectures themselves.

The Geometer’s Sketchpad is far from a technocentric tool, and if it is used as such, it

will not produce expert mathematicians. As stated previously, it is simply a tool which

inspires students to think deeply about concepts, given proper guidance from an
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instructor or peer. It certainly needs a “push” from a more knowledgeable other. Papert

states (1993), “But to say that intellectual structures are built by the learner rather than

taught by a teacher does not mean they are built from nothing.” The Geometer’s

Sketchpad is a great tool for PBL and IL learning, but it certainly requires structure,

guidance, and support.

Because of the scaffolding that was provided and the user-friendly design of the program,

my working memory wasn’t consumed by trying to learn a new program. Human sensory

memory has a limited capacity in which humans can perceive only a limited number of items at

once. For example, we can only memorize a certain number of numbers at once. This

information then enters through working memory, where learning takes place. Working memory

also has a duration and capacity of about 7 items and 30 seconds. When there is minimal

guidance for a given task, it can lead to cognitive overload. For example, if I had been given the

challenging problem referenced above on The Geometer’s Sketchpad without having first had a

few days to explore the program itself, I would have immediately entered into cognitive

overload. I would have been frustrated that I didn’t understand the program, let alone the

question. In the working memory (assuming there is little to no cognitive overload), new

knowledge is filtered and built until it goes into long term memory for future use. If nothing has

changed in long-term memory, then nothing has been learned. Because my professor had

properly scaffolded the course by helping us develop skills on The Geometer’s Sketchpad,

cognitive load was spent on thinking deeply about geometric concepts.

The Geometer’s Sketchpad is essentially exclusively abstract unless there is a realistic

problem in a specific context or culture that has been presented by the instructor. If one looks at

Constructionism and Social Constructivism by Seymour Papert and Lev Vygotsky, respectively,
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with a glance, he or she will note the emphasis on context, culture, and affect. Many have noted

their more empathetic, relational, cultural leanings, contrasting with Piaget’s Child-Development

Theory. Piaget seems to have very strict “boxes” for the different stages of development.

Although Piaget, Vygotsky, and Papert would all believe that knowledge and the world are

constantly reconstructed through personal experience (which differs dramatically to objectivism),

“Papert is more empathetic than Piaget… Adjusting, stretching, and expanding current views of

the world [is] necessary. Papert always points toward this fragility, contextuality, and flexibility

of knowledge under construction” (Ackermann, 2001). With these definitions, The Geometer’s

Sketchpad might not qualify as a constructionist or social constructivist tool.

A closer look at constructivism reveals that not all math or geometry problems must be in

their proper real-world context and culture. Papert believed that math can and should be made

more concrete and tangible through technology. Technology, specifically The Geometer’s

Sketchpad, can help math feel like art by drawing and manipulating figures. Technology and

The Geometer’s Sketchpad make math seem more like a way of thinking, and not necessarily

getting an answer to a given problem. Papert’s object-to-think-with should help a student draw

connections in order to easily comprehend abstract information. In this sense, Papert believes

that with the right object-to-think-with, one could defy the given restraints of Piaget’s stages of

development. In other words, if The Geometer’s Sketchpad is a true constructivist object-to-

think-with, then students of multiple ages should be able to use it to understand complex,

abstract ideas. Although The Geometer’s Sketchpad may not be using real-world problems, the

tool enables learners to take very abstract information and draw geometric diagrams to

understand it better.
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The Geometer’s Sketchpad is undoubtedly a highly recommended tool for several

reasons. It allows students to construct geometry, bringing the abstract to the concrete through

tangible drawings and further manipulation. If used properly by a more knowledgeable other,

The Geometer’s Sketchpad can be a constructivist tool and object-to-think-with to help students

transfer knowledge into long term memory and understand concepts deeply in an organized

manner like an expert. The Geometer’s Sketchpad is an excellent tool because of its user-

friendly and sleek design, but it is only effective with the guidance, support, and scaffolding of a

more knowledgeable other pushing students to new levels of difficulty and abstractness.
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References

Ackermann, E. (2001). Piaget's constructivism, Papert‘s constructionism: What’s the difference?

Retrieved from http://www.sylviastipich.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Coursera-

Piaget-_-Papert.pdf

Battista, Michael T. Shape Makers: A Computer Environment That Engenders Students’

Construction of Geometric Ideas and Reasoning. Computers in Schools, 17(1/2), (2002):

105–120.

Frekering, B. G.. Conjecturing and Proof-Writing in Dynamic Geometry PhD Thesis, Georgia

State University (1994).

Hmelo-Silver, C. E., Duncan, R. G., & Chinn, C. A. (2007). Scaffolding and achievement in

problem-based and inquiry learning: A response to Krischner, Sweller, Clark (2006)

Educational Psychologist, 42(2), 99-107. Retrieved from

http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/hmelo_ep07.pdf

Hollebrands, Karen. "The Role of a Dynamic Software Program for Geometry in High School

Students' Understandings of Geometric Transformations." Proceedings of the 24th

Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the

Psychology of Mathematics Education, Columbus, Ohio: ERIC (2007): 695-705.

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction

does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discover, problem-based,

experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.

McLeod, S. (2010). Zone of Proximal Development. Retrieved from

https://www.simplypsychology.org/Zone-of-Proximal-Development.html
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Sinclair, N. Mathematics and Beauty: Aesthetic Approaches to Teaching Children, New York:

Teachers College Press (2006).

Sutherland, Ivan E. Sketchpad: A man-made graphical communication system, Ph.D. Thesis.

courtesy Computer Laboratory, Unversity of Cambridge (January 1963 and September

2003).

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The Geometer’s Sketchpad.( 2014). The Sketchpad Story. Retrieved from

http://www.dynamicgeometry.com/General_Resources/The_Sketchpad_Story.html