Mathematics Education in the Digital Era

Marcel Danesi

Learning and
Teaching
Mathematics in
The Global Village
Math Education in the Digital Age
Marcel Danesi

Learning and Teaching

Mathematics in The Global
Village
Math Education in the Digital Age

123
Marcel Danesi
Victoria College
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON
Canada

ISSN 2211-8136 ISSN 2211-8144 (electronic)

Mathematics Education in the Digital Era
ISBN 978-3-319-32278-0 ISBN 978-3-319-32280-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32280-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016935970

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Chapter 4
Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

Abstract American pop culture is everywhere, reaching the entire globe. While
many aspects of this culture might seem to be superficial, there are many others
that, on the other hand, have significant value. This chapter will look a several
domains of pop culture where math figures prominently, including comic books,
movies, television, and video games. The pedagogical aspects of the integration of
“pop math” with “school math” are discussed throughout.

I think the key divide between the interactive media and the
narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic
pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated
from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television
show.
Stephen Spielberg (b. 1946)

Introductory Remarks

At the start of the 1920s, changes in technology, leading to cinema and then radio as
mass entertainment media, brought about a veritable new type of culture—termed
popular culture or simply pop culture—a culture that is now everywhere in modern
urbanized societies, sustained by all kinds of electronic media and digital platforms.
At first, its advent onto the social stage appeared to have no implications for
education—after all, education took place behind closed doors and walls and was
thought to have no connection to the outside world of entertainment (as discussed
previously); indeed, pop culture spectacles and texts were kept away from the
classroom, because they were thought to be ephemeral, banal, and “mind-dumbing”
products of a marketplace populism gone amok. And, in fact, until the advent of the
Digital Galaxy, no math teacher would have ever contemplated bringing into the
classroom such “trivialities” as comic books and video games, not to mention
assigning the viewing of television programs or movies related to math as part of
homework. This was certainly the case in my own educational background. But the
world has changed drastically.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 109

M. Danesi, Learning and Teaching Mathematics in The Global Village,
Mathematics Education in the Digital Era 6, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32280-3_4
110 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

Pop culture references and materials based on it seem to be not only growing in
math education, but also quickly becoming a kind of silent norm. The primary reason
for this is, arguably, that pop culture has itself become a dominant cultural form,
obliterating or replacing the traditional anthropological distinctions between local
folk cultures and various “high” forms of culture. These are still around, of course, but
they have merged in a mediasphere that does not distinguish categorically any longer
between them. Indeed, a “high culture” movie, such as Amadeus (1984), not only
became quickly part of pop culture lore, but also won Oscars for its artistry. This
blurring of the lines has been supported, of course, by the ever-spreading influence of
the mass media on the modern world. Without mass communications technologies,
only localized forms of pop culture would have emerged and quickly receded from
the mainstream social scene. Mass printing technologies made it possible for the
emergence of pop literary forms, such as the dime novels and pulp fiction magazines;
recording technologies projected pop music styles onto the national and international
stages; radio became a major entertainment venue in the 1920s, spreading pop culture
ever more broadly; in the 1950s television became an all-embracing medium for
popularizing everything from science to courtship; and the Internet has spread the
popularization process across the globe.
In the first chapter, it was argued that anecdotal math has become a new way of
popularizing math to general audiences and, more importantly, for making it inter-
esting in classrooms across the world. Math has also surfaced in similar anecdotal
ways on television, in cinema, and in other media. This has ignited a debate between
those who wish to keep popularization out of the classroom and those who want to
make it part of the extended classroom, that is, of the classroom without walls.
The goal of this chapter is to look at the relation today between math education
and pop culture. Specifically, after an overview, it will discuss the role of comics,
television, cinema, and video games as part of how math education is embedding
itself more and more into the world outside the classroom. Needless to say, the
present foray into the education-pop culture partnership is based on subjective
selections. So, it is bound to leave gaps and to involve various speculative areas.
The study of pop culture and its relation to math education is not an educational
science; it is ultimately an interpretive one. But I believe that it is something that
can no longer be isolated from the overall assessment of the changing character of
math education today, which is becoming more and more linked to culture studies
and the humanities (see Karaali 2015).

The Pop Culture Paradigm

Pop culture—especially in its American and Western European versions—has been

the target of critical attacks from all kinds of intellectual and ideological quarters.
Among the first to criticize it as a negative force in social evolution were the
scholars belonging to the Frankfurt School, which included Theodor W. Adorno,
Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Leo
The Pop Culture Paradigm 111

Lowenthal, among others. Generally, they saw it as a banal “commodity culture,”

which produced cultural works in the same way of manufactured products to be
sold in the marketplace and discarded after a very short period of time. It was thus
ephemeral and always in search of newness—a situation that semiotician
Roland Barthes (1957) designated “neomania.” The Frankfurt School and Barthes
saw capitalist societies as tying artistic forms to a “culture industry” obeying only
the logic of marketplace economics. Adopting Italian Marxist Gramsci’s (1947)
concept of “hegemony,” they claimed that the commodification of culture was
controlled surreptitiously and manipulatively by those who held social-financial
power. Gramsci coined the term in reference to his belief that the dominant class in
a society used many kinds of instruments of persuasion, which varied from outright
coercion (incarceration, the use of secret police, and threats) to gentler and more
“managerial” tactics (education, religion, and control of the mass media), in order to
gain conformity of thought among the masses. The concept of hegemony has found
widespread use in current media studies and in some social sciences.
The Frankfurt School theorists were, overall, pessimistic about the possibility of
genuine culture under modern capitalism, condemning most forms of popular culture
as crude spectacles that pacified the masses with ephemeral entertainment value.
They also saw the goals of modern education as being influenced by the same
marketplace mindset. In fact, the rise of pop culture in the 1920s was made possible
by a partnership that it made with the mass media and the business world—a part-
nership that started making headway slowly into schools. In his 1922 book, Public
Opinion, the American journalist Walter Lippmann argued that the growth of mass
media culture had a powerful direct effect on people’s minds and behavior. Although
he did not use any empirical method to back up his argument, it is still difficult to find
a counterargument to it. Lippmann saw the world of commodity culture as producing
“pictures in our heads” (Lippmann 1922: 3), implying that the mass media shaped our
worldview by providing us with images of things that we had not experienced before.
In effect, the media control us, not us the media. Years later, in Manufacturing
Consent, Herman and Chomsky (1988) argued that since the ownership of the mass
media is concentrated in the hands of a few powerful and wealthy people and groups
(the mega companies), agenda-setting in politics and education is largely controlled
or at least influenced “from above,” contrary to the grassroots origins of both politics
and education in America. Because media depend on advertisers for their revenues,
they will focus on simplistic and light-hearted programming that support a consumer
mood in audiences. The experts used in news sources are likely to be members of the
elite themselves and if news stories contradict or dismiss the elite’s viewpoint, var-
ious forms of “flak” are used that help justify the elite’s political strategy, such as the
threat of communism during the Cold War.
But things have changed since the Frankfurt School, Lippmann, and Herman and
Chomsky. In the current mediasphere, audiences are not monolithic or homoge-
neous as they were in pervious eras. For this reason it is harder to control people.
Audiences are now described as “niche” and “virtual.” In the world of TV, many
channels are available through cable, and as audiences move to the Internet there is
no longer a uniform public exposed to the same type of media content. A second
112 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

trend is the shift from audiences as passive receivers of content to audiences as

producers. Known as the creative commons—the sum of all original works pro-
duced—the new media have upset the traditional marketplace for pop culture
creation and consumption. Indeed, the cart has been so overturned that it may signal
the end of pop culture as we have known it since the 1920s. YouTube, for example,
has created a blur between consumers and producers of content as well as between
experts and novices.
In a way, the creative commons emphasizes that pop culture has always been
populist, that is, culture by the people for the people. Its appropriation by the
business world was an inevitable one, but also a convenient one for most (especially
white) artists and performers. And, as some have claimed, pop culture has often
been a site of resistance against dominant groups in society, unlike what hegemony
theorists claimed. This certainly was the case of the counterculture movement of the
1960s and early 1970s, when popular music was not only a money-making
enterprise but also part of a political resistance movement against what the hippies
called the “military and business complex.” So, pop culture is not just a trivial
culture; it is also an empowering culture. George Gershwin was clearly aware of
this when he exalted jazz to the level of classical music art in works such as
Rhapsody in Blue and the marvelous opera Porgy and Bess.
Above all else, pop culture may have brought an end to the traditional
book-oriented intellectual. This does not imply that intellectuals are no longer
required by society, but simply that they now must share the limelight with the makers
of pop culture. The communal brain still needs leaders. But these are as likely to come
from digital platforms, especially YouTube, as from traditional print-era sources.
There are those who excoriate a return to the past and “real” literature, philosophy,
music, and art. The disappearance of what have been called the “grand narratives” and
the appearance of “commodity narratives” that require little or no philosophical
thought is a major strain of criticism leveled at pop culture. But although the
deconstruction of authoritative voices and their replacement with pop voices, such as
Bart on the Simpsons, is somewhat troubling, it is correct to say that the pop voices
often have much to say. They simply say it differently than do scholarly and academic
voices. The new media-based voices are as powerful as the academic ones, as can be
seen in how comic books are read today for both insight and entertainment. The comic
book art of Charles Schulz is a perfect example of this.
McLuhan saw a strong synergy between the rise and evolution of pop culture
and technological changes. Because the Internet has united the entire planet, and
because the mediasphere has embraced pop culture as a substantive part of its
content alongside other cultures (academic, scientific, and so on), it comes as no
surprise to find that everything tends to become tailored for mass audiences more
and more, including math. The world of knowledge is less and less “pre-classified”
by experts; it is a world in constant flux. The traditional print-era view of schooling
is that it should be based on pre-classified knowledge, rather than on data that is
collected as the need arises. The history of the idea of education as being based on
pre-selected information is a product of the alphabetic mind; it is encapsulated by
McLuhan (1964: x) as follows:
The Pop Culture Paradigm 113

By Plato’s time the written word has created a new environment that had begun to
detribalize man. Previously the Greeks had grown up by benefit of the process of the tribal
encyclopedia. They had memorized the poets. The poets provided specific operational
wisdom for all the contingencies of life—Ann Landers in verse. With the advent of indi-
vidual detribalized man, a new education was needed. Plato devised such a new program
for literate men. It was based on the Ideas. With the phonetic alphabet, classified wisdom
took over from the operational wisdom of Homer and Hesiod and the tribal encyclopedia.
Education by classified data has been the Western program ever since.

Since McLuhan’s day, this situation has started to change, as argued already in
the previous chapter. Social media and pop culture are now becoming more and
more intrinsic to education, putting it increasingly into the hands of both teachers
and students who now see the educational process as something other than learning
based on “pre-classified data.”

The New Schoolhouse

McLuhan’s educational evaluation of the Electronic Age, made decades before the
advent of the Digital Age, reverberates with relevant insights to this day. It is worth
repeating here in its entirety (McLuhan 1964: 12):
Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition, the
key phrase at IBM. When data move instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to
cope with data at electric speed in typical situations, of “information overload” men resort
to the study of configurations, like the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelstrom. The drop-out
situation in our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young student today
grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not
of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in-depth. At
school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information.
The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student
can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the
educational scene relates to the “mythic” world of electronically processed data and
experience that he takes for granted. As one IBM executive puts it, “My children had lived
several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one.”

The schoolhouse today is ensconced even more in an electronic universe where

the interrelationship of subjects, to paraphrase McLuhan, is even more a reality. The
“little red schoolhouse” of the past is a total anachronism, and is gradually giving
way to the “digital schoolhouse”—a locus that is no longer completely fettered by
pre-classified information, but by interrelationships of information, including
intertwinings with the worlds of the mass media and of pop culture.
In a truly insightful collection of essays, Mathematics in Popular Culture:
Essays on Appearances in Film, Fiction, Games, Television and Other Media
(2012), Jessica and Elizabeth Sklar have shown how math education can no longer
keep pop culture away from the digital schoolhouse, especially since math itself has
become a common theme in pop culture, transforming it into a meta-text for
pedagogy, that is, as a source of ideas, illustrations, and so on. Access to this
114 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

meta-text is instant, given the presence of movies and television programs men-
tioned in the anthology in online venues. Films such as Good Will Hunting, A
Beautiful Mind, and Stand and Deliver, stage plays such as Breaking the Code and
Proof, and television programs such as the crime series Numb3rs and many epi-
sodes of The Simpsons, interweave mathematics conspicuously into their narratives.
And movies and programs such as Lost, The Princess Bride, and War and Peace,
all make references to math in the scripts.
The insertion of math in various domains of pop culture, from films, sports,
role-playing games, and television shows to science fiction, plays and new works of
literature, is now common. Math has re-entered the piazze (previous chapter) to
both engage and entertain masses of people. Although there might not be a direct
face-to-face debate about the issues that math raises, there is at the very least an
awareness that mathematics is part of the human experience of reality. This, in
itself, can show the teacher how to interrelate math with the humanities and the
social sciences. In the new schoolhouse this interdisciplinary approach is more
necessary than it has ever been in the past, given that student learning styles are
prepared to accept connections of all kinds as self-sustaining, like the circuits in an
electric system. It might be useful simply to list some of the more popular movies,
plays, and television programs of the last few decades that involve mathematics in
some way and to varying degrees:

Movies Plays TV/Web TV

It’s My Turn (1980) Picasso (1993) Math Country (1970s)
Sneakers (1992) Arcadia (1993) Numbertime (1993)
Antonia’s Line (1996) Copenhagen (1999) In Her Own Words (1991)
Good Will Hunting Hypatia (2000) Solving Fermat (1997)
(1997)
Pi (1998) Proof (2000) MIT’s Tech Talk (1998)
Enigma (2001) QED (2001) John Nash (2002)
A Beautiful Mind Fermat’s Last Tango (2001) Numberjacks (2009)
(2001)
Proof (2005) Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen The Great Math Mystery
(2007) (2015)

Aware of the growing importance of pop culture in math education, a special

issue of the journal PRIMUS: Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics
Undergraduate Studies (2007) explored its uses in the classroom, arguing overall
that such utilization is breaking down some of the long-held myths about math and
mathematicians, such as being remote from the world of everyday life. It presents
articles which argue that the incorporation of pop culture into pedagogy has started
to take concrete shape across the educational landscape—for instance, some
teachers have used the game show Friend or Foe to teach about game theory, others
have adapted movies, cartoons and advertising to discuss quantitative reasoning,
and so on. The issue also points out that mathematicians themselves have become
The New Schoolhouse 115

producers of pop culture—a fact that was discussed in Chap. 2 with respect to the
many pop math books on the market. There are also articles in the issue, however,
that raise concerns about the quality of the math and the portrayals of mathe-
maticians that pop culture treatments sometimes entail. But the students themselves
would see these concerns generally as marginal to the main focus of the math itself
presented in pop culture texts. Moreover, they can easily spot stereotyping,
hyperbole, exaggeration, or false representation.

The Comics

An intrinsic component of pop culture has always been cartoons and comic books.
They symbolize what a large portion of pop culture is all about—a pastiche culture
amalgamating text, pictures, and narrative. Comics have probably always existed, but
were not called this way in the past. The early pictographic and hieroglyphic texts,
found on walls and on papyri, were very similar to comic book style, combining visual
and conceptual elements—a fact that was brought out by the movie Unbreakable
(2002), directed by M. Night Shyamalan, which portrays the comics as modern day
pictographic-hieroglyphic texts dealing with the same kinds of myths about heroes
and the mysteries of life. In other words, comic book style today retrieves orality in a
secondary way—to recall the argument of the previous chapter. This is why they
arguably still retain their popularity in both print-paper and digital versions.
McLuhan (1951, 1964) also saw the cognitive and social value of comic books.
They were more than escapist channels—they symbolized the Zeitgeist of the era in
which technology, old and new, converged to replace philosophical dissertation as a
mode of understanding ourselves. He used the comic book characters Blondie and
Dagwood to show how the comic book medium is a guide to everyday life and social
trends. Blondie is a model of domestic propriety and correctness, while her husband
Dagwood is the figure of an emasculated male. Of course, it was his interpretation,
and it was tied to the family situation of his times, but the fact that comics can be used
as sources of understanding of who we are today is the relevant point. But McLuhan
was critical as well of the content of many comics and especially our obsession with
them. He was, in other words, not just a critic and/or a user of new media; he was both.
Coupland (2010) called him the first ever “metacritic,” that is, the first academic who
felt impelled to examine the form and contents of modern media and their contents
and at the same time participate in them.
The best example of the power of comic books, McLuhan claimed, was MAD
magazine, because it merged with television using a “visual vocabulary” and
because it spoofed advertising and many aspects of pop culture itself, including
Disney cartoons. In other words, to understand the pros and cons of pop culture, the
best critics are the makers of pop culture themselves. Without his lead, it is unlikely
that serious scholars nowadays would write on the meaning of comic books or
dissect an episode of Game of Thrones as having social resonances. Movements
like the culture jamming one would also have been unlikely to emerge. Their
116 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

subvertisements (spoofs of advertising) have a definite McLuhanian metacritical

quality to them. It is thus little wonder that he made a cameo appearance on Woody
Allen’s Annie Hall (1976)—the comedic director who understood the power of
metacriticism perhaps more than any other.
One of the first American texts with the essential characteristics of a comic strip
was created by Richard Felton Outcault, appearing in the series titled Hogan’s
Alley. It was published on May 5, 1895, in the New York Sunday World. The strip
depicted squalid city tenements and backyards filled with dogs and cats,
tough-looking characters, urchins, and ragamuffins. One of the urchins was a
flap-eared, bald-headed child with a quizzical, yet shrewd, smile. He was dressed in
a long, dirty nightshirt, which Outcault often used as a placard to comment on the
cartoon itself. Known as the yellow kid, it is from this character’s name that the term
yellow journalism derives. While the Sunday newspaper comic strips were origi-
nally designed primarily for children, the daily comic strips were intended to attract
all kinds of audiences. Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent, first published in 1914,
capitalized on the popularity of the pulp detective and mystery genre of the era.
Another early maker of comics was Roy Crane, who created Wash Tubbs in 1924.
The adventure genre began with the publication in 1929 of Tarzan and Buck
Rogers. Adventure comics became instantly popular and have remained so to this
day. Comic and cartoon characters never age and thus can appeal across generations
of readers. There have been exceptions to this pattern—starting with Gasoline Alley
by Frank O. King where the characters aged day by day—but, by and large, time
seems to stand still in the world of the comics.
There is no evidence (at least that I could find) that mathematics was a topic of
interest in early comics. But, from the start, they were more than entertainment.
Krazy Kat, for instance, has been regarded by many as one of the most amusing and
imaginative works of narrative art ever produced in America. The work of Charles
Schultz also falls into the category of thought-provoking comics. His strip Peanuts,
which was originally titled Li’l Folks, debuted in 1950, and became one of the most
popular comic strips ever, appearing in more than 2000 newspapers and translated
into more than twenty languages. Its characters—Charlie Brown, his sister Sally,
his dog Snoopy, his friends Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Peppermint Patty, and Marcie,
and the bird Woodstock—have become icons of pop culture. They are all children,
but their insights into life seem immediate and meaningful even in their simplicity.
The tone of the comic strip is one of subtle sadness—a veiled Angst that begs
intrinsic questions about life and existence.
Comics have inspired plays, musicals, ballets, motion pictures, radio and tele-
vision series, popular songs, books, and toys. Everyday language is replete with
idioms and words created for the comics. For example, the code word for the Allied
Forces on D-Day was Mickey Mouse, and the password for the Norwegian
Underground was The Phantom. Painters and sculptors have incorporated
comic-book characters into their art works; motion picture directors have adapted
techniques of the comics into their films. Cartoon and comic book characters are as
iconic as are movie stars and rock musicians—Bugs Bunny, Homer Simpson,
Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Flintstones, Fat Albert, Popeye, Scooby-Doo, Arthur,
The Comics 117

Winnie the Pooh, Mr. Magoo, Felix the Cat, Yogi Bear, Mighty Mouse, Woody
Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry, to mention just a few, have become emblems of pop
culture generally. More to the point of the present discussion, mathematics has
found a textual home, so to speak, in the contemporary comic book medium, where
its ideas are treated in a visual-narrative way that is unique to this medium.
Learning math through comics is certainly relevant in the new schoolhouse.

Comic-Book Pedagogy

Many students read comics, either in print or online. There are now entire textbooks
and books for general consumption that utilize the cartoon-comic book format.
A few examples of this genre of pop math for illustrative purposes will suffice.
One example is the Manga Guide to Calculus, by Kojima and Togami (2009), an
English translation of a very popular Japanese book. The Guide unfolds as a manga
comic narrative, featuring the heroine Noriko, a reporter who wants to cover
hard-hitting issues. She turns to her math-minded boss, Mr. Seki, who teaches her
how to analyze her stories with a mathematical eye based on the calculus. Other
“manga guides” include Statistics by Takahashi and Inoue (2009), and Linear
Algebra by the same two authors (2012). In all cases, a manga narrative is used to
present basic concepts. Similar to these is The Cartoon Guide to Calculus by
Gonick (2011), but this book uses more traditional western style cartoons, each of
which deals with some aspect of the calculus. Gonick has published a number of
such books. The cartoons are funny, tapping into the original function of cartoons,
which were appropriately called the funnies.
Humor and laughter are basic characteristics of pop culture. Aware of the
humorous side of doing math, vis-à-vis the serious language with which it is taught
and discussed in the traditional classroom, Bill Watterson frequently satirizes both
this classroom and typical pseudo-math pretentiousness shown by some students in
his Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. Below is a truly hilarious example (Fig. 4.1):

Fig. 4.1 Calvin and Hobbes comic strip

118 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

Another humorous cartoon strip that has great potential for teaching basic math
skills is the Comic-Strip Math: Problem Solving by Greenberg (2010). Graphic and
comic novels are also found across this genre. An example is Logicomix by
Doxiadis et al. (2009), a graphic novel on the ideas and work of Bertrand Russell,
who crosses paths in the novel with Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein. The novel leads the reader to grasp the importance of the
debate on the logical foundations of mathematics, but in a humorous way. There are
a slew of similar publications, in the sense that they use comic-book style to deal
with profound issues of math; some are crafted in the adventure story format,
appealing thus to younger readers.
It is not surprising to find that a comic-book genre of pop math has great appeal
today. It is a sign of the times, to use a cliché, showing that we no longer perceive
pop culture and humorous treatments of serious topics negatively. I surveyed 10 of
my ex-students who went on to teach math in high school in the province of Ontario
(previous chapters) and asked them if: (1) they are using pop culture materials such
as comic books and, if not, whether (2) they would consider using them. After the
survey I asked them to assess the pedagogical value of such materials, especially
since the classic texts and textbooks of mathematics have rarely used cartoons. In
my schooldays, it would have been considered frivolous and even damaging psy-
chologically to use such texts. Here are the results:
1. Only one of the teachers used comic books systematically, claiming that both
she and the class enjoyed them enormously and that when used to supplement a
specific learning unit they were both effective and motivational in supporting the
relevant learning task.
2. Five of the others occasionally brought comic strips and comic books to class
that they found by reading newspapers or going online. They wanted to instill
humor into the classroom and bring out that math is not dry and remote.
3. All of the teachers said that they would seriously consider using the comic book
format if it helped them do their job better.
4. No one saw the comic book as deleterious to learning or inappropriate to the
traditions of math education: most said that we live in a different world and it
doesn’t matter what materials we use, as long as their content is correct and
effective.
The results did not surprise me, nor do I believe that very different results would
emerge from similar surveys across the math educational landscape. The theme of
this book is that we live in a different world than the Age of Print and that this
brings about new worldviews, institutions, and practices. In my own era, even
bringing a comic book to class would have been reason for undergoing some form
of punishment and, in extreme cases, even expulsion from school. Certainly, nary a
wink is made today when math and comics are mentioned in the same breath and
Comic-Book Pedagogy 119

when materials that utilize the comic-book format to teach about math are presented
to teachers or educators. The traditional schoolhouse is clearly in jeopardy of
becoming totally outdated.

The Math Movie

Ever since the movies came onto the social scene at the turn of the twentieth
century, they have become major media of entertainment and, in many cases,
artistic engagement. Movies are powerful, because as McLuhan (1964: 384) so
aptly put it (as usual): “The business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the
reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by
typography and film.” In this statement one can detect McLuhan’s simultaneous
reluctance and acceptance of new media, whereby every invention was at the same
time a step forward and a step backward.
Cinema has shown remarkable durability in the Digital Age. With all kinds of
media platforms for viewing movies today, from YouTube to Netflix, it is truly
amazing that people still go to the movies and that new movies are showcased first
on the traditional movie screen. This says a lot about the emotional power of
communal viewing. The technology for making and delivering movie fare may
have changed, but the social locus for enjoying the movie experience has really not
changed all that much. Of course, the number of movies that are being added to or
produced for online venues is increasing exponentially. The growing stock of
digital tools and real-time analytics that are offered by self-serve platforms is
changing the marketplace for cinema. And so is the way popularity for movies is
determined, since it is occurring more and more by “word-of-mouth” social media
like Twitter and Facebook.
The early films were at first print-to-screen narratives, that is, most were scripted
from some fiction print text or from some genre characteristic of print culture
(adventure, crime, romance, and so on). Pulp fiction in particular led to many movie
genres, including the early serials put out by Republic Pictures. One genre that is
virtually never mentioned in cinema histories, but which deserves autonomous
status, is what can be called the “math movie” (Polster and Ross 2012). A perusal of
movie databases indicates that there are more than 700 movies that in one way or
other incorporate mathematics into the script—some more (and even exclusively),
some less.
A classic and now cult math movie is Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 film, Pi (π):
Faith in Chaos. A brilliant mathematician, Maximilian Cohen, teeters on the brink
of insanity as he searches for an elusive pattern or code hidden in π. For the
previous ten years, he was on the verge of his most important discovery—unlocking
the numerical pattern hidden in the chaotic stock market. The number π seemed to
be the key. As Cohen verges on a solution, an aggressive Wall Street firm, set on
120 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

financial domination, and a Kabbalah sect, intent on unlocking the secrets hidden in
their ancient holy text, approach him, as he races to crack the code. Aronofsky
portrays the number π, which is the real protagonist, as a mysterious symbol in the
hidden language of the universe. In his novel Contact (1985), scientist Carl Sagan
suggested that the creator of the universe had buried a message deep within the
digits of π for us to figure out over time. As Aronofsky’s movie implies, the stream
of digits of π itself seems to challenge us to try to find a message within them. What
is our attraction to this number? Is it perhaps the fact that a circle is probably the
most perfect form known to human beings? And why does π appear in statistics,
biology, and in many other domains of knowledge? It simply keeps cropping up,
reminding us that it is there, and defying us to understand why. Very much like the
universe itself, the more technologically advanced we become and as our picture of
π grows ever more sophisticated, the more its mysteries grow. In the end, Cohen
loses his sanity over this mystery.
I myself have used Aronofsky’s film in a course I teach on the history of math
puzzles, because it contains a host of themes—the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden
Ratio, probability, and so on—that are part of the course. The comments the stu-
dents have made over the years after watching the movie validate the pedagogical
view espoused here, albeit anecdotally. The kind of philosophical discussion in
class that arises from the film would have been very difficult to encourage without
the movie. There are also many pop math books written about π that I have also
referenced for the class. This amalgamation of movie math with pop print math has
shown itself to me to be very effective, since it taps into a connected learning style
of students today, as mentioned throughout this book.
Movies flesh out the drama inherent in math topics like no other medium can. On
the screen math becomes itself a mysterious language, a means to understand the
world, and a part of the human condition. A list of relevant films in this genre is
worthwhile listing here alongside the math concept, principle, or technique
involved. As in previous chapters, such a list has obvious pedagogical applications,
serving a useful informational function. The list includes both movies with simple
sections in them that involve math in some way and those where math is a primary
thematic element:

Movie Math
Wizard of Oz (1939) The relevant episode in this movie is when the Wizard bestows a
degree of “thinkology” upon the scarecrow, who then recites a
theorem regarding the sides of an isosceles triangle.
In the Navy (1941) In this long-forgotten film, comedians Bud Abbot and Lou
Costello discuss how to make seven batches of thirteen donuts
each for the Naval officers in a hilarious fashion. Despite the
humor, the solution is discussed in concrete mathematical terms.
Donald in Mathmagic In this animated Disney movie, Donald Duck goes through
Land (1959) adventures based on math, including his discovery of the Golden
Ratio and the Pythagorean theorem.
(continued)
The Math Movie 121

(continued)
Movie Math
It’s My Turn (1980) This is a romantic comedy in which Jill Clayburgh plays the role of
a math professor. The movie starts with Clayburgh proving the
snake lemma of homological algebra to an insufferable graduate
student. This is the only scene based on actual math. When I
discussed the solution in class, showing the relevant clip from the
movie, a group of students asked where they could get more
information on the lemma, at which point I gave them several
websites to consult. This was a clear example to me of the wall-less
classroom that could be connected to both pop culture and the
Digital Galaxy.
Stand and Deliver Teacher Jaime Escalante believes that math is the only channel
(1988) through which his students can escape from the Barrio. The
students show courage and determination in taking the Advanced
Place Calculus test. They did so well that the College Board thinks
that they must have cheated. There are several obvious social
subtexts here.
IQ (1994) The movie features Albert Einstein and includes an interesting
discussion by Meg Ryan of the runner paradox of Zeno mentioned
in Chap. 1.
Good Will Hunting This is a psychological film portrait of the mathematical mind. The
(1997) plot revolves around a troubled young person from a poor
working-class district in South Boston. It emphasizes that math
genius is not a product of privileged upbringing; it is a talent much
like musical and artistic talent that cannot be suppressed by the
curves that life throws at a person.
October Sky (1999) The movie tells the story of NASA engineer Homer Hickman who
used math while in high school to show that a rocket he had
designed did not cause a fire near his school.
Castaway (2000) As the protagonist tries to figure out how to survive alone on an
isolated island in the Pacific, he calculates the dimensions of the
prospective search area, which suggest to him that he may never be
found.
A Beautiful Mind (2001) This is the story of John Nash and probably one of the best known
math movies of all time. The portrayal of a mathematician’s mind
which had become troubled is truly dramatic and emotionally
powerful. There is little math in the movie, though, but it does
connect math and madness, recalling π by Aronofsky.
The Bank (2001) The plot concerns a mathematician who works in a bank. The
movie shows how math can be used in forensic science and in the
service of justice, with examples of Chaos Theory and complex
integrals.
Proof (2005) The movie makes an indirect reference between mental
eccentricity, sanity, and mathematics, much like π and A Beautiful
Mind. The daughter of a famous, but mentally troubled,
(continued)
122 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

(continued)
Movie Math
mathematician suspects that she has inherited his insanity. The plot
is filled with episodes where mathematical theorems are used. It
also portrays mathematicians as social beings, not remote thinkers
perched high on some intellectual pedestal.
The Imitation Game This movie is about the great Alan Turing and his theories and
(2014) struggles. Needless to say, cryptanalysis is featured prominently.

The fact that the math movie is now a popular genre is evidence that pop culture
does indeed change the rules of the game. I found no evidence of any movie based
on mathematics or mathematicians before the 1930s. In early eras of pop culture,
math likely was seen to be too intellectual and thus uninteresting for a mass
audience. In the contemporary movie era, this situation has changed with math
becoming one of a plethora of topics that have come down from their high aca-
demic perch and relate to everyone.
The detective story is an exception to the lack of math in early pop culture. The
origin of this genre is traced generally to Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Murders in the
Rue Morgue” (1841), which sets the pattern for detective stories in general: (1) clues
are used to figure out who committed the crime; (2) human logic and imagination are
used together to understand the clues; (3) a subplot, often of an amorous nature, adds
romantic or sexual interest to the story; (4) an unexpected twist or turn of events lead
to the denouement and the solution. The crime-detective story is a mathematical
mystery that is solved by human ingenuity. The great fictional detectives all excelled
at deductive and inferential reasoning. Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, and
Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, are all logicians in detective garb, who do not use
mathematics directly, but often use mathematical reasoning and even artifacts. For
example, in his story “The Gold Bug” (1843), Poe used cryptography as a central
element of the narrative. Protagonist William Legrand is bitten by a gold-colored bug.
His servant Jupiter fears Legrand may, as a consequence, be losing his mind. On the
throes of insanity, Legrand organizes a team to find a buried treasure whose location
he discovered after deciphering a secret message. Critics point out that the huge
success of the story revolves around the decipherment of a cryptogram, which is
reproduced below for the sake of illustration. It is a simple substitution cipher based
on an analysis of letter frequencies:
The Math Movie 123

The decoded message is:

With spaces, punctuation, and capitalization the message is:

A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat twenty-one degrees and thirteen
minutes northeast and by north main branch seventh limb east side shoot from the left eye
of the death’s-head a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.

By solving the crime, the reader is engaging in mathematical thinking along with
the fictional crime solver, drawing inferences from the available evidence, and
reaching a conclusion from the given facts. In most stories, there is a twist that is
meant to lead the reader astray so that the final solution comes as a surprise. The
detective genre is really a subgenre of anecdotal math, since it revolves around the
use of mathematical thinking to solve crimes.
The math movie has helped bring mathematics to the people, demystifying math
considerably. This may disturb purists, but the pop math stream in pop culture is
really a throwback to the math feuds and debates of the Renaissance, as mentioned
several times, and of course to the many interactions that Socrates had with people
in his Academy. This does not belie the lofty goals of mathematics as an intellectual
tool of discovery. On the contrary, it brings out the human part of the discipline and
how it fits into the overall paradigm of history and life.
Math movies clearly have a place in the math classroom today, since, like pop
math novels and comics, they deliver math content in a way that taps perfectly into
the mindset of people living in a connected society. Students (and many teachers)
have been reared in this world, watching television and movies. It is little wonder,
therefore, that math education based on print era materials is often found to be
124 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

tedious and dreary. The content may be right; but the medium for its delivery is
slightly off. Pedagogy cannot remain slavishly tied to the past with its values and
worldviews.

TV Math

Before the advent of the Internet, television was arguably the most influential
medium in forging the connected intelligence world. From the outset, television
programming developed rapidly into more than an assortment of fact and fiction
narratives; it became itself a social text for an increasingly larger segment of
society, functioning as a kind of filter through which people gleaned a large portion
of their information, intellectual stimulation, and recreation. TV’s total integration
into modern society can be seen by the fact that TV sets are now ubiquitous—in
hotel rooms, airports, schools, elevators, office waiting rooms, cafeterias, some
washrooms, and even outer space. The successful U. S. manned landing on the
moon in July 1969 was documented with live broadcasts made from the surface of
the moon. The world, it would seem, has been put one big television monitor.
As McLuhan (1964: 391–392) remarked, TV is a generic teaching machine,
replacing the teaching function of print artifacts through its more persuasive sec-
ondary orality:
One of the major pressures of TV has been to encourage the “teaching machine.” In fact,
these devices are adaptations of the book in the direction of dialogue. These teaching
machines are really private tutors, and their being misnamed on the principle that produced
the names “wireless” and “horseless carriage” is another instance in that long list that
illustrates how every innovation must pass through a primary phase in which the new effect
is secured by the old method, amplified or modified by some new feature.

The critiques of TV—it fosters violence, it dumbs people down, it has killed our
need to read, and so on—are well known and need not concern us here. But those
who attack TV are scholars and researchers who are either reared in the print era
and its values or else are those who secretly would like to blame the media for all
the world’s troubles. TV is not linear; it is holistic. Philosopher Suzanne Langer
(1948) characterized reading a page as a “discursive” mode of processing infor-
mation; whereas interpreting musical or visual content involves a “presentational”
mode instead. In holistic texts, the whole cannot be broken down easily into its
constituent parts without obliterating its meaning. One can take the notes out of a
melody and examine them separately, but in so doing there is no melody—just
notes. On the other hand, one can take words out of a written text and consider them
separately without destroying the text itself. To put it another way, discursivity has
the salient feature of detachment, which means that the constituent parts can be
considered separately—one can focus on a specific statement in a printed text,
detaching it from its location in the text, without impairing the overall under-
standing of the text. In contrast, the meaning of a drawing is presentational, since no
TV Math 125

one feature of the drawing can be detached from it without destroying its
interpretation.
Like the movies, TV is a powerful holistic “teaching machine” because of its
presentational nature. More pertinent to the present discussion, it is a machine that
has developed a new genre of pop math—which can simply be called “TV math.”
Actually, TV math can be further subdivided into subgenres. One of these can be
called “documentary math” because the math is found on documentary programs
revolving around some theory or some mathematician on channels such as PBS,
Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and the like. These are very much like
the YouTube videos discussed in the previous chapter and thus require no special
mention here.
A second subgenre can be called “fiction math.” It is very similar to movie math,
but has also many of the features of anecdotal math. Fictional TV programs such as
Futurama, Numb3rs, and The Simpsons revolve occasionally or totally around math
themes.
Futurama was an animated series that ran on the Fox network from 1999 to
2003. It was then revived by Comedy Central for 26 new episodes between 2010
and 2011 and then again for a second set between 2012 and 2013. Although it did
not focus exclusively on math, it brought math into an episode if the theme required
it. The series was about a pizza delivery boy, Philip J. Fry, who awakens from being
cryogenically frozen one thousand years later in the thirty-first century and who
works for an inter-planetary pizza company—a veritable sardonic touch that tinged
the whole series. Futurama was one of the most mathematically knowledgeable
programs on prime time television, alongside Numb3rs. It should come as no
surprise that several members of the writing team were mathematicians. No one
really reads dense treatises on mathematics gladly or even meaningfully; but we can
now watch many of the same topics of the treatises tackled by the television
medium in a comedic fashion. This then can become a stimulus for students to
actually go and consult the treatises. Another sitcom that often deals with math is
The Simpsons, as Singh’s book, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
(2013), points out. Singh actually provides the math details interspersed through the
comedic episodes of the sitcom, which often involve advanced notions. Given the
humorous context in which math occurs it makes viewers feel comfortable about it,
not as a brainy subject, but as a real one with everyday nuances.
This “bringing-math-to-the-people” through a TV animated sitcom is a perfect
example of how much math has become embedded in the pop culture piazza.
Fiction math is not just a clever new way to make math popular; it is part of the
metatext of pop culture which, as mentioned, has obliterated long-held rules of
separation between high and low culture and between academia and the real world.
In the case of Numb3rs, the fiction math genre has merged with the detective story.
It ran on CBS from 2005 to 2011. The series followed an FBI agent, Don Eppes,
and his brother, Charlie, who helped his brother solve crimes with the use of
mathematics. An episode starts typically with a crime to be investigated by Don
who then seeks Charlie’s help. The latter develops a mathematical model that
pertains to the case. Actual mathematicians worked as consultants and real math
126 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

was used in the program. In The Numbers Behind Numb3rs: Solving Crime with
Mathematics (2007), Keith Devlin and Gary Lord (the main consultant for the
show) demonstrate how the math techniques on the program were based on actual
uses by law enforcement agencies to catch criminals.
Here is a sampling of the topics covered by the program. As can be seen, these
constitute a veritable entire curriculum in math:
1. Probability and statistics (episodes 101, 112, 113, 201, 203, 207, 211, 213, 218,
223, 305, 308, 309, 312, 314, 321, 322, 404, 406, 411, 501, 504)
2. Sequences (episodes 102, 108, 210, 320)
3. Graphs (episodes 103, 203, 216, 222, 224, 307, 316, 318, 322, 323, 413)
4. P = NP (episode 104)
5. Number Theory and Analysis (episodes 105, 106, 319, 416)
6. Cryptography (episodes 106, 202, 205, 223, 311, 324)
7. Geometry and Trigonometry (episodes110, 221, 303, 310, 403)
8. Game Theory (episodes 110, 302, 317, 321, 410, 415)
9. Calculus (episodes 204, 206, 301, 302, 313)
10. Combinatorics (episodes 207, 214, 217, 503)
11. Matrices (episodes 207, 219, 405)
12. Games (episodes 218, 414)
13. Algorithms and Computer Modeling (episodes 303, 323, 401, 407, 408, 417)
14. Fractals (episode 409)
15. Set Theory (episode 412)
16. Algebra (episodes 417, 418)
This kind of TV program (and the above sitcoms as well) would have been
unthinkable in previous eras; but today it is almost an unconscious reflex of pro-
gramming fare. Indeed some mathematicians are starting to move away from the
print work as the medium for research and are starting to use new connective
technologies more and more. The PolyMath Project is one of them (previous
chapters). Another example is Russian mathematician’s Grigory Perelman’s proof
of the Poincaré Conjecture in 2002, which he posted on the Internet (O’Shea 2007;
Gessen 2009), refusing apparently both to publish it in the traditional manner or to
accept the Fields Prize and the Clay Millennium Prize for his solution. At first,
Perelman’s proof was seen as unlikely, because it had not undergone the traditional
review process for publication in refereed journals. Does the fact that the proof is
now accepted universally mean that the tradition and practice of peer reviewing is
obsolete? I leave this as a rhetorical question.
The fact that everything from Fermat’s Last Theorem to prime number theory
are treated on sitcoms and crime programs is truly indicative of how much the
world has changed. I can find no such programming in early television. There is no
doubt that mathematicians of the past laughed, joked, and fought each other in
rivalries and feuds (as we saw). But these were seen as side issues to how “real
math” was done. This no longer holds true, as the movie and television media have
made rather conspicuous.
Video Games in Math Education 127

Video Games in Math Education

Perhaps no other electronic medium has brought mathematics to young people more
than the video game one. Video games started out as arcade games in the 1920s. In
the early 1970s the electronic tennis game named Pong propelled the video-game
industry in the United States. After it nearly collapsed in the mid-1980s, Japanese
companies, such as the Nintendo Corporation, assumed marketplace leadership,
improving game technology and introducing popular adventure games such as
Donkey Kong and the Super Mario Brothers, thus spawning a video game sub-
culture that is still thriving.
The question of why video games have become so popular has, to my mind, a
simple answer. They are extensions (in the McLuhanian sense) of the ludic instinct
in all humans. In one way or other, we seek play in some form. The video game is
one of these. As Fine (1983) observed a while back, video games constitute an
avocation, calling players unto an occupation of sorts. But they have nothing to do
with traditional work, since they are built around play. They also provide a context
for making friends and for developing a sense of community. When players enter
the video game world they assume a fantasy identity, abandoning their real-life one.
The game thus allows people to endow themselves with attributes that they may not
possess in real life, such as courage, good looks, intelligence, and wisdom.
As Steven Johnson has cleverly argued, video games may in fact be fostering a
new and more powerful form of consciousness and intelligence. The new tech-
nology, he claims, provides a locus for the same kind of rigorous mental workout
that mathematical theorems and puzzles do. They improve abstract problem-solving
skills, and their complex plots and intricacies make more people sharper today than
at any other point in the history of civilization. Johnson calls this effect a “Sleeper
Curve.” The term comes from Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper, in which a
granola-eating New Yorker falls asleep but reawakens in the future, where junk and
rich foods actually prolong life, rather than shorten it. According to Johnson, the
subtext of the movie is clear: the most apparently debasing forms of mass diversion
turn out to be cognitively nutritional after all.
Video gaming is now part of the communal brain, as the studies collected by
Adams and Smith (2008) show. Online video game culture provides contexts for
people who share common interests and fantasies to engage in them collectively, as
if they were in electronic tribes. Perhaps no one more than Keith Devlin has argued
convincingly that video games are, therefore, an ideal medium to teach math today
(Devlin 2011, 2013). He has described what is involved in designing and realizing
successful math educational videogame software to foster mathematical thinking
skills. In one study, Devlin (2013) identifies what he calls the “symbol barrier” as
the biggest obstacle to a mastery of math. He devised this term on the basis of the
research conducted by Nunes et al. (1993) in the street markets of Recife. He
summarizes their work as follows (2013: 54–55):
128 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

With concealed tape recorders, they posed as ordinary market shoppers, seeking out stalls
being staffed by young children between 8 and 14 years of age. At each stall, they pre-
sented the young stallholder with a transaction designed to test a particular arithmetical
skill. The purpose of the research was to compare traditional instruction (which all the
young market traders had received in school since the age of six) with learned practices in
context. In many cases, they made purchases that presented the children with problems of
considerable complexity. What they found was that the children got the correct answer
98 % of the time…About a week after they had “tested” the children at their stalls, the three
researchers went back to the subjects and asked each of them to take a pencil-and-paper test
that included exactly the same arithmetic problems that had been presented to them in the
context of purchases the week before, but expressed in the familiar classroom form, using
symbols…Although the children’s arithmetic had been close to flawless when they were at
their market stalls—just over 98 % correct despite doing the calculations in their heads and
despite all of the potentially distracting noise and bustle of the street market—when pre-
sented with the same problems in the form of a straightforward symbolic arithmetic test,
their average score plummeted to a staggeringly low 37 %…When ordinary people are
regularly faced with practical mathematical tasks as part of their everyday lives, they
rapidly achieve a high level of proficiency (typically hitting that 98 % mark). Yet their
performance drops to the 35 to 40 % range when presented with the same problems in
symbolic form.

Devlin concludes that ordinary people can do practical mathematics. But they
have more difficulty doing it if it is presented with symbols. The paper-and-pencil
format is not the same as the real life setting because of the inherent symbol barrier
in the former. As he (2013: 6) asserts: “The symbol barrier is pervasive. But can it
be circumvented?” Devlin suggests that video games provide the ideal means for
young people today to overcome the symbol barrier. He makes his argument on the
basis of a relevant analogy (Devlin 2013: 55):
When a TV or movie director wants the audience to know that a particular character is a
mathematician, somewhere in that character’s first scene you will see her or him writing
symbols—on a piece of paper, on a blackboard, or, quite likely, on a window or a bathroom
mirror. This character-establishing device is so effective because, as the director knows very
well, people universally identify doing math with writing symbols, often obscure symbols.
Why do we make that automatic identification? Part of the explanation is that much of the
time we spent in the school mathematics classroom was devoted to the development of
correct symbolic manipulation skills, and symbol-filled books are the standard way to store
and distribute mathematical knowledge. So we have gotten used to the fact that mathe-
matics is presented to us by way of symbolic expressions.

Devlin is well aware, however, that symbolism (notation) is part and parcel of
the craft of mathematics. His claim is that to overcome the symbol barrier, and thus
get students to use symbols effectively, the medium of instruction used must be
relevant to them. The symbol barrier crystallizes during the early stages of math
education (Devlin 2013: 58):
The symbol barrier is real. By using symbolic presentation and symbolic methods as the
primary teaching vehicle for all of mathematics, the result is not only do many people fail to
master symbolic mathematics, they do not develop the (everyday-) mathematical thinking
ability that we know is within their grasp. (They will possess that ability to different
degrees, to be sure. But the development of any capacity for mathematical thinking is useful
in today’s world!)
Video Games in Math Education 129

Devlin’s suggestion to use video games to overcome the symbol barrier is an

intriguing one, since it implies that these games are not simple ancillary devices, but
appropriate channels for instruction in an age where electronic connectivity is the
rule. He points out that several institutes have started employing video games in this
way—the MIND Research Institute (with its Jiji math and other games), Motion
Math, and Thinkout (with its game Number Bonds). These are educational video
games that have video-game-based representations of math ideas and problems.
From this kind of pedagogy, he reaches the following logical conclusion (Devlin
2013: 60):
Given proficiency in (everyday) mathematical thinking, there is good reason to expect that a
greater number of students will eventually master formal, symbolic mathematics to some
degree, since the former can be used to ground learning of the latter. That in itself will
benefit society. But the greater societal prize is a citizenry having everyday mathematical
thinking skills on a par with reading.

Of course, video game technology, like any other technology, can be used in an
ancillary fashion, paralleling the use of comics, for example (above). The Get The
Math website, for instance, offers materials and videos for this purpose. More
importantly, the video game format provides a new context for participation and
collaboration among learners. Angotti and Bayo (2012) conducted a study
exploring ways to integrate video games in math teaching. The researchers worked
alongside teachers in Washington State attempting to examine how video game
technology could be employed to engage both students and teachers in a common
effort to treat math content. They worked with teachers to redefine the curriculum,
finding that math education that integrates the video technology is not only viable,
but inevitable. In other words, video games are really just another one of the media
that seem to amplify learning in an electronic age (McLuhan’s first Law), while at
the same time retrieving previous modes of learning. Indeed, the study showed that
the best results are achieved when video games are integrated with other media,
including print ones. In my view, the power of video games lies, again, in its ludic
basis. Learning through play is actually one of the oldest principles of learning
across the globe. Typically, it is believed that this form of learning is restricted to
childhood, but as the video game experience is showing, it is likely an age-less
principle.
In an overview of the research findings on the uses of educational video game
technology, Malykina (2014) comes to the following relevant conclusions:
1. Students seem to take a more active role in learning with video games.
2. Video games seem to be effective when combined with other activities and with
instruction from a teacher.
3. There is little experimental proof that video game use translates into better test
scores or better math thinking.
4. Current curriculum standards are not conducive to exploratory teaching
methods that incorporate video games.
5. A backlash against the standard curriculum is gaining broad support as video
games are found to be more and more relevant to the classroom today.
130 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

6. The “Quest to Learn” public school in New York City, which opened in 2009,
offers a glimpse of how gaming can be used to motivate students. The cur-
riculum is organized into “missions” and “quests,” focusing on challenges that
may have more than one correct answer, letting students explore different
solutions. The students also study game design. The outcomes appear to be
very positive.
7. If educational video games are well executed, they can make inquiry and
project-based learning effective.
8. Beyond teaching, video games can also offer relevant information about how
well a child is learning, because video games can provide instantaneous feedback
—via scores—that teachers and students can use to determine skill level.
9. Very few studies have examined whether or not video games improve class-
room performance and academic achievement overall. But there is evidence
that some improvement occurs with specific students.
10. A 2013 University of Cambridge study found that the improvements in game
scores for children with low levels of working memory did not extend to
broader skills. The study gave seven- to nine-year-olds 25 sessions of either
video games set to challenge their working memory or the same video games
set at an easy level. The researchers examined whether playing the more dif-
ficult games improved performance on additional measures of working memory
as well as enhanced other skills. They concluded that brain-training video
games improve children’s performance only on very similar games, an effect
that likely results from practice, rather than from the nature of gaming itself.
There are several additional issues that can be raised here that I have not found in
my own perusal of the relevant literature. The main one can be articulated as
follows: “What happens when video games are replaced with some other interactive
technology?” Of course, one could ask the same question about those who learned
through print-based teaching materials that quickly went out of date. But in this
case the learning is very closely aligned with the structure of the game. This
structure may not extend to the future and thus to the ever-changing systems of
education.
If video games are indeed effective it is because, as mentioned, the ludic or play
instinct in us is of primary importance in learning. This is why puzzles have been
used throughout the history of math education. In effect, video games involve
puzzle-solving and it is thus relevant to take a brief digression here into the nature
of puzzle-solving. Puzzles are different from problems. It was Plato who used the
word problem to characterize a type of question, consisting of information or a set
of conditions designed to elicit a particular answer. Since antiquity, mathematicians
have conceived of two basic types of problems—one in which the solution can be
easily envisaged, and one in which it cannot. The former is a problem proper and
the latter a puzzle (although the latter was not named this way until much later).
Generally speaking, a problem provides all the required information to reach a
solution directly; a puzzle, on the other hand, provides information that appears to
be incomplete or else that conceals a twist or a clever trap, thus making it much
Video Games in Math Education 131

Fig. 4.2 Plane geometry A

problem

x 20

B 9 C 16 D

more difficult to reach a solution. Both types are used typically in classroom
pedagogy today.
The difference between the two can be illustrated with two problems from plane
geometry (from Danesi 2007). In the given figure, what is the value of x? (Fig. 4.2).
This problem has a straightforward solution because all the information that is
needed to solve it is given to us (or else it can be easily fleshed out from the
diagram). The solution can be broken down in point form as follows, for the sake of
illustration:
1. In triangle ACD, AD2 = AC2 + CD2
2. So, AC2 = AD 2 2 2 2
p − CD = 20 − 16 = 400 − 256 = 144
3. Thus, AC ¼ 144 ¼ 12
4. Now, in triangle ABC, AB2 = AC2 + BC2
5. So, x2 = 12p2 + 92 = 225
6. Thus, x ¼ 225 ¼ 15
Now, consider the following puzzle, devised by Martin Gardner, which at first
glance would seem to suggest a similar use of the Pythagorean theorem: Given the
dimensions of the radius OD (6 + 4 = 10), can you calculate the length of the
diagonal AB in rectangle AOBC? (Fig. 4.3)

Fig. 4.3 Gardner’s plane

geometry puzzle
A C

O 6 B 4 D
132 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

Fig. 4.4 Solution

A C

O 6 B 4 D

As it turns out, it is impossible to solve this problem in a straightforward fashion

as the one above. There is simply not enough information on the given diagram to
allow for a straightforward use of the theorem. This is thus a puzzle, requiring
imaginative, rather than a straightforward application of the theorem. So, let’s
consider what is known about circles and rectangles. First, the diagonals of a
rectangle equal each other in length. This suggests drawing the other diagonal
(OC) of rectangle AOBC (Fig. 4.4):
By doing this, we can see that diagonal OC is also a radius of the circle. The
radii of a circle are equal. Line OBD is a radius and, as can be seen, is equal to 10
(6 + 4). So, line OC is also equal to 10. From this we can conclude that the other
diagonal, AB, is equal to 10.
Students in my puzzles course are typically fascinated by this problem. The
likely reason is that it produces the same kind of surprise that a mystery story does.
It also introduced them to the “puzzle art” of Martin Gardner, and a number of them
decided to go and find his works and a few decided to do their course essay on his
work. It is relevant to note that Gardner was, indirectly, a supporter of anecdotal
and puzzle math in education, as can be gleaned not only from his writings, but by
the meticulousness with which he prepared his puzzle books, indicating that they
had pedagogical relevance or significance. As is well known, he started writing a
monthly column on recreational mathematics for Scientific American in 1956 after
his free-standing article on hexaflexagons in the December issue, which became
somewhat of a fad in New York City (showing the connection between pop math
and pop culture). Flexagons are flat models constructed by folding pieces of paper
that can be flexed (folded) in certain ways to reveal faces besides the two that were
originally on the back and front. A hexaflexagon is a hexagonal flexagon.
Pedagogical Summary 133

Pedagogical Summary

The math topics found in comic books, movies, television programs, and the like
can be really subsumed, as mentioned, under the general rubric of pop math, along
with the print materials discussed in the second chapter (such as novels about math
and mathematicians). Pop math is different from anecdotal math (opening chapter),
which is the occasional use of math to describe some event or trend in everyday life.
There is, of course, considerable overlap between the two. The main difference is
that pop math is a genre in pop culture and can be subdivided into several sub-
genres. Anecdotal math is an amusing or interesting use of math to shed light on a
real incident or state of affairs. As such, it has always been used in the history of
mathematics. In its own way, though, it is as interesting and entertaining as are all
the subgenres that make up pop math.
The use of pop math and even anecdotal math in the math classroom may be
seen by some as frivolous edutainment, not real education. Again, it is relevant to
turn to McLuhan once again for wisdom on this topic. McLuhan is often called the
“high priest of pop culture,” because he understood its value like no one else did in
his era. Speculation about what he would think about pop culture today abounds
(see, for example, Levinson 2001; Krewani 2014). He certainly understood that pop
culture is connected to technology and thus he would probably understand how it
has evolved today in tandem with new technologies. He certainly knew that the
spread of pop culture has been brought about largely because mass communications
technologies have allowed for its diffusion to huge audiences.
But how would he see the use of artifacts such as pop math and anecdotal math
in teaching today? Would he see it as an inevitable spread of edutainment, which
seems to be a defining characteristic of the mediasphere. The YouTube videos
described in the previous chapter would likely be classified as edutainment by some
teachers because they mesh learning with entertainment. But the point made here is
that this is advantageous to learning, given the electronic village in which we live,
with television, movies, comic books, and video games connected to each other in
various ways (as discussed). The foregoing discussion may be somewhat over-
drawn. Pop culture perpetuates itself (and has always perpetuated itself) by adapting
to the technologically-changing media that deliver it to large masses of people. The
fact that it has been appropriated by education is thus not surprising. It remains to
be seen, though, if it will persist or if the online platform will have rendered the
very idea of popular culture and its correlative idea of edutainment obsolete, with
perhaps a completely new form of pastiche culture arising from the ashes, so to
speak.
McLuhan saw the inevitability of edutainment. He understood that the distinc-
tion between education and entertainment is a moot one in a connected world and
thus that the contexts where entertainment occurs can easily be adapted to the
contexts where education occurs. But can fiction, in the form of novels, plays, films
and even video games, truly pass as education when it comes to teaching math? Or
are the “old fashioned” ways still the best? McLuhan would have seen this question
134 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

as irrelevant. The amalgamation of education and entertainment is unconscious in

everyone today.
The term edutainment is actually misleading, because it suggests something
flimsy and suspect. Ideally, learning something worthwhile should always be at
least a little bit fun, but is there really fun in watching movies about math and does
this lead to learning math? Many teachers today suggest that deteriorating interest in
math as an abstract skill can be reversed with innovative new approaches to
teaching that can “make math cool.” Young people have not been reared in the
same way as their parents or grandparents, mainly because of the technologies now
at their fingertips on a daily basis. As a result changes are occurring rapidly
throughout the social and educational landscapes. Edutainment is thus becoming an
unconscious pattern in pedagogy. It is now a vital tool for sparking young peoples’
inherent love of math, who can easily tell when the entertainment ends and where
the real math learning begins. They enjoy the thrill of video games and comic-book
reading while being completely aware that it is part of fiction. Indeed, by using the
pop culture meta-text systematically and commenting on it critically, students can
learn to scrutinize the facts as they are presented and ask the right questions. The
problem is in the subtle inaccuracies that are harder to detect because they are part
of the fiction involved in the presentation. But the more discriminating students
become, and to my mind they certainly are becoming that, the less worrying
edutainment becomes.
So, the question of turning math learning into a game or something “frivolous” is
not at issue here; the use of pop math in the classroom is consistent with the new
Zeitgeist, which has broken down the barriers between levels culture through the
development of materials and media that have completely blurred the lines. In the
print era, the educational materials consisted of a textbook and ancillary materials
that were designed to reinforce the textbook and classroom teaching. It should not
surprise us that in that era the outside world of movies and television was seen as
interfering with true learning. The mindset reflected a linear view of learning:
“from-the-teacher-through-the-textbook-and-other-print-materials-to-the
student-in-a-classroom” (Fig. 4.5).
In today’s world this model is no longer relevant. This does not mean that print
materials have disappeared—on the contrary textbooks and print materials are still
useful as discussed several times previously. However, in the modern classroom a
different view has emerged, whereby learning is seen as extending to the outside
world at the same time that it brings that world inside the classroom. The view is no

CLASSROOM

Teacher ↔ Print Materials ↔ Learner

Fig. 4.5 Print era classroom

Pedagogical Summary 135

longer linear; it is concentric. It has expanded to embrace technological means of

interaction, such as social media and the use of materials from pop culture,
which now allow the classroom to be immersed into the world, rather than keep
itself separate from it. The linear model reflects the classroom with walls, whereas
the concentric one reflects the classroom without walls; in it the teacher, student,
and the materials used are all embedded in the real world of the Global Village
which envelops the classroom (Fig. 4.6):
Note that in this model the teacher-student relationship is still the “hub” of the
learning process. Unlike the MOOC model, the human aspect of dialogue is crucial
and perhaps even more so today since it can be lost in the quagmire of digital
“static.” Also, note that print materials are retrieved, as McLuhan would put it, in a
new way by blending them with meta-textual materials.
The Global Village classroom is an extension in the McLuhanian sense. For this
reason is useful to go over this notion here in summary fashion. There are three
main types of extensions associated with tools and technology: (1) tools that extend
human biology, (2) tools that extend cognitive, communicative, and emotional
faculties, and (3) tools that extend institutions. Some examples of type (1) tools are
as follows:

GLOBAL VILLAGE

Social Media

CLASSROOM

Textual Print Materials

Teacher ↔ Student

Meta-textual materials
(comics, video games, etc.)

Fig. 4.6 Global village classroom

136 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

Tool Extension
Telescope Extends the ability of eyesight to see farther
Hammer Extends the ability of hands to modify the environment
Shovel Extends the ability of hands to dig holes
Axe Extends the ability of hands to cut wood
Wheel Extends the ability of feet to go farther and more quickly
Clothing Extends the ability of skin and hair to shelter the body from the elements
Box Extends the ability of hands to carry things
Knife Extends the ability of fingernails to cut into things

Type (2) tools are devices and artifacts that make some expressive, commu-
nicative, intellectual, emotional, or affective ability more embracing and broader in
scope. Examples include the following:

Tool/Technology Extension
Telephone Extends the ability of the voice to reach someone farther away
Computer Extends the ability of the brain to carry out logical tasks
Alphabet Extends the ability of the mind to condense and store information
economically and efficiently
Mathematics Extends the ability of the mind to understand and use notions of quantity
and space
Music Extends the ability of emotions to find expressive contexts
Internet Extends the ability of the voice, mind, and other expressive-intellectual
faculties to reach everyone on Earth
Mobile devices Extends the ability to communicate instantly removing the time and space
constraints of the past
Science Extends the ability to use our instincts to understand phenomena through
the mind and with mathematical notions

Institutional extensions—type (3)—are those that involve groups and their

institutions. Note that the term “institution” is used with some poetic license here.
A few examples will suffice:

Institution Extension
Culture Extends the ability of groups to survive and engage in meaningful ways
School Extends the ability of individuals to impart knowledge to groups
Facebook Extends the ability of people to remain connected
Twitter Extends the ability of people to follow each other in some task
YouTube Extends the ability of people to put themselves on display
(continued)
Pedagogical Summary 137

(continued)
Institution Extension
Academia Extends the environment or community concerned with the pursuit of
knowledge, which in tribal times was embodied in a single individual or two
(such as a shaman)
Global Extends the ability of people to recapture the sense of tribal life
Village

The wall-less classroom in this framework can now be defined not as a

replacement of, but an extension of, the traditional classroom—that is why the
critical components of the latter are still in the picture (so to speak). The main
feature of education is still the teacher-student relationship. No matter how much
we try to mess with this, it is still an essential part of education—hence the failure
of MOOCS and similar models. The key here is the notion of retrieval. In any
technological evolution, along with an extension an “amputation” tends to occur,
which is a counterpart to the extension. The automobile has led to the loss of
physical locomotion capacities that might have evolved biologically more than they
have. So, it has led to the amputation of walking as a means to carry out many
social tasks. We are thus no longer a walking culture, but an automobile culture.
But we have not completely amputated walking, retrieving it in novel ways, such as
in walking clubs, jogging, running competitions, and so on. The Internet extends
communication and reach, and in so doing it has amputated the art of calligraphy as
a means to convey personality. It has also amputated the previous role of voice
technologies like the telephone. But we have retrieved writing and the voice in
various other ways, such as courses on writing and graphology.
If we accept the logic of retrieval, it can be seen that the classroom without walls,
and its incorporation of meta-textuality, is nonetheless retrieving various aspects of
previous modes of teaching. Total amputation is dangerous. We praise the
advantages of the automobile, but tend to ignore the pollution it causes and the
isolation from others that automobiles have encouraged. We praise extensions, and
minimize amputations. McLuhan suggests that we do so at our own peril.
Losing the kinds of literacy and numeracy skills that the print book introduced
into human life would be foolish. The automobile did indeed extend the locomotion
abilities of the foot, allowing us to go faster and with less effort. But amputations in
this case include the loss of muscle strength and air quality. This is perhaps why
professional exercise gyms and diet systems are now so prominent—they result
from an amputation of a biological capacity (in the McLuhanian sense, of course)
due to the automobile. Similarly, while meta-textuality and social media tech-
nologies have greatly extended the traditional classroom, the peril is that the
amputation of previous tools, such as the textbook, may bring about unwanted
learning consequences. That is the paradox of technological extensions—they must
allow us to look both forward and back in order to be effective. The invention of
138 4 Pop Culture in Math Pedagogy

musical instruments did not eliminate the singing voice—it was accompanied by
them.
The danger was labeled as “over-extension” by McLuhan, whereby a technology
like the automobile, when over-extended, leads to atrophy, pollution, and fatalities
that challenge its benefits. Indeed, the dangers of over-extension might outweigh
the benefits of extension, leading to a reversal of the latter. McLuhan used the
following example to make this point (cited in McLuhan and Zingrone 1997: 21):
Although it may be true to say that an American is a creature of four wheels, and to point
out that American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age
than at voting age, it is also true that the car has become an article of dress without which
we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

We have conditioned ourselves to be unafraid of something that is actually quite

dangerous. Similarly, we might be in danger of ignoring the consequences of
eliminating traditional tools from the classroom, at the same time that it morphs into
something different and more embracing of the world outside its walls.

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