Sidewalk Math Research Highlights

Sidewalk Math Research Highlights

Sidewalk Math (SWM) carpets combine movement, visual and spacial intelligence, play, and imagination into the activities of young children learning math skills and developing number sense in school.

Research in schools across Massachusetts has shown that the Sidewalk Math carpet-based activities created by the young children, mostly kindergarten students, combined with guided facilitation and structured lessons created by their teachers, add a dimension of enthusiastic and imaginative free play to the task of math learning. Students engage in kinesthetic activity spontaneously with the carpet designs, using them as the basis for learning and sharing their newfound math skills and for devising new number-based games leading to enhanced abilities in math.

The students, aged 3-5 years, had both structured and unstructured activity time with each of the three different number pattern designs, Count Things:

Count By:

and Count Dragons:

Students with special needs, or those without number recognition skills, offer the most noticeable improvement and enhanced engagement with the numbers and patterns on the carpets (Diaz, 2018).