Aspects that affect whole number learning: cultural artifacts and mathematical tasks

The core of this chapter is the notion of artefact, starting from the discussion of the meaning of the word in the literature and offering a gallery of cultural artefacts from the participants’ reports and the literature. The idea of artefacts is considered in a broad sense, to include al-so language and texts. The use of cultural artefacts as teaching aids is addressed. A special section is devoted to the artefacts (teaching aids) from technologies (including virtual ma-nipulatives). The issue of tasks is simply skimmed, but it is not possible to discuss about arte-facts without considering the way of using artefacts with suitable tasks. Some examples of tasks are reported to elaborate about aspects that may foster learning whole number arith-metic (WNA). Artefacts and tasks appear as an inseparable pair, to be considered within a cultural and institutional context. Some future challenges are outlined concerning the issue of teacher education, in order to cope with this complex map.