The Touchy-Feely Integral: Using Manipulatives to Teach the Basic Properties of Integration.

Elementary education makes use of manipulatives in the teaching of fundamental mathematical concepts. As the age of the students progress, mathematics becomes much more abstract and concepts such as the integral become harder for some students to visualize. One approach we have implemented is the use of construction paper as a manipulative. This simple hands-on object can be used to demonstrate the basic properties of integrals to students who struggle greatly with the underlying ideas, especially when they are first encountered. Through the treatment of the integral as something that can be held in the hand and modified with the use of scissors, many of the basic properties of integrals can be demonstrated, as well as the intuition behind the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]