The duo “pascaline and e-pascaline”: an example of using material and digital artefacts at primary school

The paper presents the design and the analysis of teaching experiments at primary school concerning the introduction and use of a “duo of artefacts”, constituted by the pascaline i.e., the arithmetical machine Zero+1, and its digital version e-pascaline. The idea of ‘duo of artefacts’ represents the innovative component of this research work, because the e-pascaline is constructed in a complementary way with respect to the pascaline. The duo of artefacts is proposed to support student’s conceptualization processes of numbers as sign of a quantity, number sequences and recursive addition. Computation and manipulation of base ten notation are two processes that students often consider separately. This duo enables the design of situations that required those two processes to be connected and to consider their effect on each other. With duo of artefacts, technology allows the development of learning environments in which it is possible to study the articulation between material and digital manipulatives for mathematical conceptualization.