Talking Maths in the

Esoteric Domain: HP
Prime Wireless
Chris Olley
chris.olley@kcl.ac.uk
chris@themathszone.co.uk

Talking Maths in the Esoteric

Domain:
HP Prime Wireless

Using HP Prime to keep dialogue in the esoteric domain (Chris

Olley)
Goals: This session uses the classroom network to focus on
Classroom talk: teacher and student, student and student
Prime-based classroom dialogue
Designing activities to generate dialogue
See my blog: www.themathszone.com
Post: Talking Maths in the Esoteric Domain:
HP Prime Wireless

Classroom Dialogue/Expected
Achievement
At the ATM London Branch conference on Saturday, Kate
Gladstone-Smith from Langdon Park School in East London,
presented her research into the nature of communication she had
observed in maths classrooms and how this differed according to
the set, the students were in.
Anyone not from the UK will need to know that in English schools
teachers decide in advance how well students will do with a
subject and place them in top and bottom sets (i.e.
class/teacher groups) accordingly).

Esoteric Domain Mathematics

Paul Dowling (Social Activity Method (SAM)) Institute of
Education, London. He suggests that a practice (in this case
mathematics education) has discourse in one of fourdomains of
action.
Esoteric Domain discourse: If the content (e.g. solving an
equation, constructing a proof) would be recognised as
mathematical and the symbols and technical vocabulary
recognised as mathematical (e.g. evaluate 3x+1=10).
Public Domain discourse where the content and the
symbols/vocabulary would not be recognised as mathematical
(but nonetheless a discourse in maths education).
Importantly, the task of the mathematics educator is to induct

Not Working in the Esoteric Domain

Kate found that students only rarely maintain any discourse in the
esoteric domain.
The teacher would mostly restrict their discourse to metaphor (in solving an
equation: get rid of the xs) or
make appeals to common sense knowledge (What is a square? Its like one of
those ceiling tiles).

Lower achieving students had very little discourse in the esoteric

domain.
Higher achieving students had at least some.
However, this was in response to the restricted discourse of their
teachers, notnecessarily to what they could achieve.

Classroom Activity
Explore conics starting with the
form

x2 + y2 = 9 in the

Advanced Graphing App.

Advanced Graphing

Enter your favourite conic

(X and Y are on screen) e.g.
X^2+Y^2=9
Press Plot
Now vary the parameters
e.g. x^2/2 or just X or
(X+2)^2 etc.
Change the = (look on
screen)
Hint: keep one standard
version as V1 to compare
with, then make changes to
V2
Report back

Classroom Activity
Explore conics starting with the form x2 + y2 = 9 in the
Advanced Graphing App.
When I saw a larger circle I would show it to the class. I asked; How did you
make the circle bigger . (i) I changed the constant , (ii) I zoomed out.
This immediately set up a rich discussion about the relationship between
graph and function and the scaling of the graph.
I then said; Has anyone found a non-closed curve?, which led to a new burst
of activity. When I saw one I could ask; How did you do that?.
The teacher discourse is generally just teacherly prompting. However, the
student discourse is predominantly in the esoteric domain of mathematics.
The HP Prime only gives access to esoteric domain mathematics (the graphs
and functions in symbolic form) positioning students to make esoteric domain

Shoe Size/Handspan

Shoe Size/Handspan
I sent out a poll asking for shoe size and handspan data. My group entered the data
on their handhelds and pressed send. In the poll results screen in the connectivity kit
the points are plotted and a line drawn, showing an overview of a possible
relationship.
However, selecting the HP Prime emulator and sending the data to it, generates a
new APP on the emulator with full two-variable statistics facilities. So, we can see a
relationship. We can see the correlation coefficient to see it is a weak relationship.
Then we validate the relationship by seeing if my hands and feet fitted the model. I
was a poor fit, so we could discuss why my hands/feet relationship was different from
the group (they were all women, which suggested a new hypothesis to test).
Issues of experimental design were discussed. Within a few minutes of setting up an
experiment we were having a well framed and well informed discussion, entirely
within the esoteric domain of statistics.

Integration
On the CAS Screen Create using the template key.
Now repeat using integrate in the toolbox/calculus
menu.
Now vary the parameters and try to control for different
integral types.

Working in the Esoteric Domain

This was unexpected. Kates research suggests it is very difficult
for teachers to sustain discourse in the esoteric domain they aim
to induct their students into. Harder still for students to work in
that domain. Yet by putting students into a setting where they
work with technology that only communicates in this domain and
by keeping the discourse framed by the technology based
activity, the vast majority of discourse is generated in the
esoteric domain.