RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
A Preliminary Design Space for Digital Tools
Page: 974
The growth of educational technologies outpaces our understanding of how to promote students’ mathematical development with such technologies. It has become increasingly important for researchers to problematize digital tool design so that educators seeking to enrich students’ mathematical knowledge with the use of digital tools support, and not hinder, student learning. In this theoretical paper, we draw on existing research on digital tools for mathematics learning to propose a framework that situates to-be-designed tools within a “design space”. We argue that an initial conceptualization of tools within this design space can help relate and distinguish tools from the literature that would be otherwise difficult to delineate or compare. We describe the spectra that comprise the digital tool design space, give examples of tools from the literature that fit within clusters of design space, and discuss the utility of such a framing.