Short Talk: Teaching and Learning Mathematics with Catrobat Embroidery Designer

View on Snap!Con

Presented By: Sarina Gursch, Vesna Krnjic


Abstract:

The Catrobat Embroidery Designer has a lot of possibilities for young developers and creative minds. With this stitching app, you can create your own designs and patterns, which can be stitched with an embroidery machine.
We will present opportunities and ways to teach students or interested users with some mathematical skills. First of all, we show how to use the Catrobat Embroidery Designer (or as equal the Pocket Code app with stitching extension). Further on we will present successfully proven teaching material, which can be easily used by teachers or students. The beauty of teaching these mathematical skills with Catrobat Embroidery Designer lies in its wide-scale starting at simple examples to a creative and infinite range of applications. For instance, if you want to create a regular pattern (which could look like a flower), you can program some circles where each needs to be turned by its beginning angle. To obtain a regular pattern one must calculate a beginning turn angle by dividing the “magical” 360 degrees by the number of circles used. (Flower). This simple example shows how easy it can be to teach not only mathematical skills but also mathematical understanding for the students.

Pocket Code is an education app, which is developed by the free and open-source project Catrobat with its roots at Graz University of Technology in Austria (https://catrob.at/pc for Android and ‎Pocket Code on the App Store for iOS). Pocket Code allows users to create programs in a playful way on mobile phones. Similar to existing desktop-based frameworks, such as Scratch or Snap!, the app uses visual blocks of code to make easy programming experience possible for people with no programming knowledge or low programming skills.
In the scope of the Catrobat Embroidery Designer, the app can program embroidery machines similar to the Austrian TurtleStitch project (https://www.turtlestitch.org/) on a desktop-based environment. As a result, self-programmed designs and patterns can be stitched on clothes or bags, so the young people have something they can be proud of, something they can wear and show to others.