How young students’ creation of analog and digital representations, in combination, may contribute to their learning of combinatorics

In this study, we elaborate on whether – and if so, how – students’ creation of analog and digital representations, in combination, may strengthen their meaning making in combinatorics while engaging in problem solving. An intervention was conducted in two Swedish preschool classes (six-year-olds) involving 25 students. The results indicate that creating a digital animation did not primarily enhance problem solving but rather served as an aid for students to redesign their analog knowledge representations, enabling them to further engage with the mathematical content. A conclusion is that the creation of analog and digital representations, in combination, contributed to students’ explorations of combinatorics and that, when integrated into a learning-design sequence, digital animations enhanced students' understanding of combinatorics. This conclusion should be seen in relation to the small scale of the study, which means that more studies are needed in order to generalize the findings.