Journal of the Learning Sciences

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Zones of mathematical play

Caro Williams-Pierce & Jordan T. Thevenow-Harrison

To cite this article: Caro Williams-Pierce & Jordan T. Thevenow-Harrison (2021)

Zones of mathematical play, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 30:3, 509-527, DOI:
10.1080/10508406.2021.1913167

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2021.1913167

© 2021 The Author(s). Published with

license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Published online: 19 May 2021.

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JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES
2021, VOL. 30, NO. 3, 509–527
https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2021.1913167

Zones of mathematical play

a b
Caro Williams-Pierce and Jordan T. Thevenow-Harrison
a
College of Information Studies, University of Maryland; bJTTH, LLC

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Most research on mathematical play and learning is Received 5 September 2020
focused on early childhood. This study examines how Revised 31 March 2021
mathematical play and learning manifest in older chil­ Accepted 1 April 2021
dren in a mathematical videogame designed by the
first author, Rolly’s Adventure. We examined how
players experienced mathematical play as they played
Rolly’s Adventure, with a particular focus on failure
paired with feedback. We used video and audio record­
ings of the players and their bodies, and screen capture
of their gameplay. Spoken language, physical gestures,
and digital actions were our primary sources of identi­
fying, understanding, and triangulating mathematical
play. We found that players pass through five zones of
mathematical play that build upon each other and
closely interrelate, and that these zones each involve
different types of failure, feedback, and learning experi­
ences. This paper provides a productive definition of
mathematical play, introduces a framework that
describes players’ mathematical play experiences, and
presents five design principles that can be leveraged to
support mathematical play.

The vast majority of research on mathematical play focuses on the natural

play of young children, and how to recognize and support them in math­
ematizing that play in both formal and informal settings (see Wager &
Parks, 2014, for a comprehensive review). Wager and Parks (2014) further
note that although research on mathematical learning and play have not
historically overlapped much, “mathematical concepts were intertwined
with many early educators’ efforts to teach young children in play-based
environments” (p. 216), such as Montessori, who designed “materialized
abstractions” (1995, p. 186) of basic mathematical concepts that children
could playfully engage with.

CONTACT Caro Williams-Pierce carowp@umd.edu University of Maryland, 4161 Fieldhouse

Drive Patuxent Building, Room 2109G, College Park, MD 20742-4911.
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and repro­
duction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
510 WILLIAMS-PIERCE AND THEVENOW-HARRISON

Considerably less research has examined mathematical play in older

children and adults (but see Gresalfi et al., 2018, who examined playful
mathematics learning in multiple ages and in multiple contexts). Such
research requires shifting from the view of play as a natural activity driven
by young children, to the view that a playful orientation toward mathematics
can be supported by designed situations (Steffe & Wiegel, 1994). Other
researchers, such as Holton et al. (2001) who worked primarily with second­
ary students, define mathematical play as a way of engaging with mathe­
matics that has emerged naturally for mathematicians and some students,
but their definition is constrained to formal learning contexts and with
traditionally presented—although rich and intriguing—problems. In other
words, investigations of mathematical play in older children and adults
generally begin with the context of formal mathematical learning and inherit
at least some of the didactic expectations of such contexts. Consequently,
while the problems may be novel and interesting to some learners, it is
difficult to ensure that all students are supported in engaging in mathema­
tical play.
We define mathematical play as voluntary engagement in cycles of math­
ematical hypotheses with occurrences of failure, and present the conceptuali­
zation of provocative objects (Williams-Pierce, 2019) as a powerful design
approach for supporting such play. Provocative objects are digital environ­
ments with five key characteristics:

(1) Consistent and useful feedback;

(2) High enough levels of difficulty and ambiguity that players experience
frequent failure that is closely paired with the feedback;
(3) Non-standard mathematical representations and interactions;
(4) Mathematical notation introduced late or not at all; and
(5) The legitimate possibility of alternative conceptual paths for success­
ful progression.

We posit that provocative objects can be a powerful way to support

mathematical play, and present a single provocative object as exemplar,
a mathematical video game titled Rolly’s Adventure (RA; Williams, 2015).
RA was designed by the first author according to a framework that synthe­
sized the fields of mathematics education (Brousseau, 1997; Brousseau et
al., 2014) and game design (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). We then give
examples of how middle-school aged players playing RA experienced
mathematical play through our framework, to illustrate how our frame­
work is a rich and powerful way to examine voluntary mathematical
learning in novel digital media contexts. Identifying the five zones of
mathematical play, and using the design characteristics of provocative
objects, illustrates how mathematical learning during play is different in
 JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES 511

feel to the player, and has different indicators for the teacher, librarian,
parent, or researcher. We present our framework with illustrative vignettes
in order to simultaneously describe the framework and establish how rich
mathematical learning and reasoning can be within digital media contexts,
even as they appear in very different forms. Just as mathematical play and
learning have a rich relationship in early childhood studies (e.g., Wager &
Parks, 2014), we describe a similarly rich relationship for older children—
and a similarly complex relationship between such play and learning. We
present this framework as a way to fill the gap in the literature about
mathematical play and learning beyond early childhood.
In the following sections, we introduce RA, contextualize the design by
describing how we used Brousseau (1997; Brousseau et al., 2014) guidelines
for adidactical situations of action to inform our understanding of mathe­
matical play. We then highlight the importance of failure, describe our
framework for understanding mathematical play, and use vignettes of mid­
dle-school aged players to describe the richness of this perspective on
mathematical play. We introduce three novel contributions to the field:
a definition of mathematical play that has roots in the fields of mathematics
education and game design; a framework for understanding and evaluating
mathematical play; and design characteristics that support mathematical
play.

Rolly’s Adventure
The game consists of 14 puzzles that build sequentially upon each other, with
a simple narrative layer to provide a goal for each puzzle as well as the overall
game. In Figure 1, we introduce an annotated version of Puzzle 1 to intro­
duce some of the key structures within the game.
When initially encountering the game, the player only knows three of the
structures labeled in Figure 1. First, the avatar labeled A represents a player—
this digital character is how the player moves about and interacts with the
game. Second, the label B indicates to the player how to interact with the
game: the glowing green “hand” symbols here indicate that the green and
gold pillows they are attached to are in actuality buttons—that is, if the player
directs their avatar to “grab” the pillow, the game will react in some way.
Third, D represents Rolly, the main character in the narrative: Rolly has been
trapped by an evil wizard, and needs help to return to their family. How to
help Rolly, what the remaining game structures are, and what the underlying
mathematical structure is, the player discovers through engaging with cycles
of hypotheses and failure paired with feedback.
By the end of the game, thanks to the failure and feedback mechanics, the
players should discover that the black dots directly underneath the buttons
(labeled C) serve to show how the game will react, and that the button chosen
512 WILLIAMS-PIERCE AND THEVENOW-HARRISON

Figure 1. Puzzle 1, with key structures labeled in white.

determines how many golden blocks (labeled E) or parts thereof will be

placed in F, the hole. For example, in this puzzle, activating the 1-button will
result in a single gold block in the hole; activating the 2-button will result in
two golden blocks in the hole (thus perfectly filling it); and activating the
3-button will result in three golden blocks in the hole, overfilling it consider­
ably. This multiplicative relationship stays unspoken throughout the game,
although the player determines the narratively based goal of the game after
Puzzle 1: that they must help Rolly by perfectly filling the hole, so that Rolly
has a flat surface to roll over—too much or too little, and Rolly remains
trapped.
The game becomes more complex over time, as players progress through
the puzzles. For example, Puzzle 4 (Figure 2a) requires players to mentally
partition and iterate the block in the hole, as simply iterating the block
overfills the hole. Puzzle 10 (Figure 2b) is when formal mathematical nota­
tion is introduced on the button labels; and Puzzle 14 (Figure 2c), is the
culminating puzzle that includes fraction notation on both the button labels
and the block in the hole.
RA was designed specifically to evoke multiplicative reasoning with frac­
tions represented by quantities (e.g., Hackenberg, 2010; Steffe & Olive, 2010;
Thompson, 2010)—that is, the hole (F) is also the intended whole, and the
block (E) is the intended fraction. Thus, players were expected to determine
what fraction of the whole is present, and multiply that by a number (shown
on the button labels, C) in order to perfectly fill the hole. However, the game
begins with no mathematical notation (much like Sengupta et al., 2015), just
quantitative representations of mathematical objects and subitizable dots on
the button labels, and later puzzles introduced notation only when it
 JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES 513

Figure 2. (a) Puzzle 4 (the block is two-thirds of the hole) (b) Puzzle 10 (formal notation
is introduced for the first time) (c) Puzzle 14 (formal notation plays a crucial role).

becomes useful for the player. Most crucially, the operation enacted by the
game in the relationship between the buttons and the blocks (multiplication)
is never explicated by the game or notation. Consequently, players have to
develop their own ways of reasoning about the game and the mathematical
514 WILLIAMS-PIERCE AND THEVENOW-HARRISON

relationships between the game objects, whether that be reasoning about

fractions and multiplication or proportional reasoning (e.g., Lobato & Ellis,
2010). In doing so, players engage in and experience Brousseau’s (1997; and
colleagues, 2014) conceptualization of adidactical situations.

Adidactical situations
An adidactical situation is a “designed problem or series of problems that is
isomorphic in some fashion to the knowledge the teacher desires the learner
to construct . . . [in order to] provoke the expected adaptation in . . . students”
(Brousseau, 1997, p. 30) through feedback “that permits the student to check
the value of her actions and understand the reasons for it” (Brousseau et al.,
2014, p. 147). Brousseau notes that
Students are only willing to enter into an a-didactical Situation [sic] in the
hope of finding pleasure and profit. They must have the hope that they will be
able to find on their own the essential parts of the solution, and that the search
itself will be exciting and intriguing. (Brousseau et al., 2014, p. 149)

Developing such situations of action requires what Brousseau termed the

didactical contract, which requires that the learner knows the situation of
action in front of them is solvable (or playable) by using their prior knowl­
edge and building upon it. In other words, the didactical contract is
a promise to the learner that the lesson or game in front of them can be
completed independently. The learner must know that the task was designed
to elicit some new form of knowledge, but “she must also know that this
knowledge is entirely justified by the internal logic of the situation and that
she can construct it without appealing to didactical reasoning” (1997, p. 30),
such as asking the teacher for the algorithm. RA was designed specifically as
an adidactical situation with a didactical contract, such that players would
understand that the game can be won through applying their own knowledge
to the internal logic of the game, and would engage in a series of problems
that are “isomorphic in some fashion” to fractions and proportional
reasoning.
Brousseau highlights the significance given to student production and action,
and video games are an ideal context for just this type of analysis of student
knowledge: the digital actions the students take signal their mathematical
knowledge, as they adapt to the novel context. Such adaptation is evidence of
learning, as Brousseau states that “teaching is the devolution of the student to an
adidactical, appropriate situation; learning is the student’s adaptation to this
situation” (1997, p. 31). We further extend Brousseau’s view of learning by
adapting Ellis’ (2007) generalizing framework to identify the processes of
learning that occur through mathematical play. In brief, Ellis defines general­
izing as occurring through iterative action-reflection cycles. In our definition of
 JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES 515

mathematical play, we include learning as cycles of mathematical hypotheses,

informed simultaneously by Ellis and Brousseau (Williams-Pierce et al., in
revision).

The importance of failure

Failure is generally a negative term when associated with mathematics
learning in schools (but see Kapur, 2014, for an account of productive failure
in mathematics classrooms), while a fully accepted—and even expected—
occurrence within the context of games (Juul, 2009). For example, Stevenson
and Stigler (1992) commented that public failure in the American mathe­
matics classroom is avoided because teachers and students “conceive of
errors as a possible precursor of ultimate failure” (p. 17). As mentioned
above, the didactical contract requires that a teacher design an adidactical
situation that a student can successfully complete and that the student be
aware that she is capable of progressing. However, Brousseau’s conceptuali­
zation of a situation of action includes the requirement of potential failure:
“Can the student lose? Does she know that she can?” (1997, p. 65).
In other words, if students bring an expectation of achievement and
enjoyment with them to a situation of action, then failure is merely context-
appropriate feedback, rather than an indication that the student is incapable
of progressing. Litts and Ramirez (2014) note that in educational contexts,
“current interpretations of failure focus on the negative implications such as
not meeting a desirable, or intended, objective” (p. 160), and recommend
reframing failure by considering it part of the process, rather than an end­
point. Salen and Zimmerman (2004) explain how games succeed at this by
saying, “ . . . challenge and frustration are essential to game pleasure. Without
them, there would be no game conflict to struggle against and no pleasure
would emerge from the process of overcoming adversity” (p. 348). In other
words, in games, failure plays a crucial role and does not automatically have
the negative connotation associated with failure in an educational setting-
consequently, in our work, we consider failure with a consistently positive
valence.

A framework for interpreting mathematical play

We contend that the best way to design digital situations of action that evoke
mathematical play requires the fusing of mathematics learning literature and
game design principles. To that end, we synthesized Brousseau (1997; Brousseau
et al., 2014) and Salen and Zimmerman (2004) into a theoretical framework for
understanding and designing for mathematical play (Williams-Pierce, 2017).
That framework was then refined through RA gameplay data. In Table 1 we
present the overall framework, briefly describe the data collection and analysis
516 WILLIAMS-PIERCE AND THEVENOW-HARRISON

Table 1. The five zones of mathematical play.

Zone Description
1. Pure play During pure play, players enjoy acting and observing the game’s
reactions, but they have not yet decided that certain actions (and the
matching reactions) are more desirable than others.
2. Developing a preference During this zone, players experience failure in whatever guise it takes,
and although they do not yet understand how their actions caused
the game’s failure state, they begin to seek to avoid failure.
3. Developing responsibility Players understand that their actions—such as activating a button—
and causality directly cause a consistent reaction from the game.
4. Developing anticipation Players begin developing, testing, and nuancing mathematical
hypotheses about their actions, the game’s reactions, and the
underlying mathematical design behind the action-reaction pairing.
5. Developing the Players begin using their previous experiences in the game to guide in-
adidactical situation game choices and reference previous learning either during or after
gameplay.

methodology of youth playing RA, then illustrate the framework in action from
the data.
Although presented as a series of zones, they are quite fluid—players are
likely to shift back and forth between them non-linearly as they play,
particularly in a situation of action that relies upon failure and feedback to
provoke the players to learn.

Brief methods
The participants were fourteen middle school students who volunteered to play
RA as part of a larger study, where eight of those self-selected to play in a dyad
with friends or siblings, while the remaining six played by themselves. Four
players were girls, and 10 were boys, as identified by their parents. However,
throughout this paper we use they singular pronouns to refer to participants, as
we failed to identify appropriate pronouns for them in two important ways.
First, we only asked the parent registering the youth participant rather than the
youth themselves; and second, we conflated sex and gender by asking only
“What gender is your child?” We thank Damarin and Erchick (2010) for high­
lighting the need for clarity of such methodological issues in our field. RA was
introduced to them with no mention of mathematics, and participants were
asked to play as if they were at home by themselves. Players took between 19 and
30 minutes to complete RA. While each player completed the game, they
experienced differing rates of failure (ranging from 11 to 24) and subsequent
replay of portions of the game means that the total number of puzzles each
player encountered varied. During gameplay, participants’ physical bodies and
voices were captured using a video camera, and their digital actions were screen-
captured in the game using Roxio Game Capture hardware and software. Video
data was synchronized from both sources, the synchronized video was
 JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES 517

transcribed for spoken language, physical gestures and actions, and relevant
digital actions within the game, and then transcriptions were analyzed in
MaxQDA.
Gameplay coding was iterative and emergent, with some sensitivity to
certain possible emergent codes due to previous research on fractions
learning and multiplicative thinking. Participants varied in terms of their
previous gameplay experience, and participants inexperienced in the
mechanics of the game were occasionally given gameplay (but not mathe­
matical) hints at the beginning of the game. We found no relationship
between past gameplay experiences and their movements through the
zones of mathematical play in this study, and thus disregard that angle in
this manuscript.

Zone 1: Pure play

During pure play, players enjoy acting and observing the game’s reacting, but
they have not yet decided that certain actions (and the matching reactions) are
more desirable than others. This zone may be the briefest of the five zones, but
it highlights one of the most crucial design aspects—the discernibility of player
action causing a game reaction. The consistency of this pairing is what permits
players to progress to the next zone, and supports the players’ belief that they
can develop a coherent understanding of the game and the underlying mathe­
matics, thus satisfying part of the didactical contract.
For example, each time a player hits the X-button and their avatar
jumps, they receive feedback that the game will respond consistently and
appropriately to their input, as a situation of action that adheres to the
didactical contract. But they have not yet discovered the purpose of the
game, the designer’s intent, or anything beyond the player’s input and
the game’s reaction to that input, and are simply enjoying the fact that
the game reacts to their actions. During pure play, players also discover
game reactions that they then seek to avoid, such as failure. Figure 3
illustrates a player activating the wrong button in Puzzle 1, and experi­
encing failure paired with feedback.

Figure 3. The player activates the first button on the left.

518 WILLIAMS-PIERCE AND THEVENOW-HARRISON

Figure 4. Emmett fails for the first time. Accompanying transcript: Complete and utter
surprise at fiery death—respawn, then a huge slow grin: “Wh- wh- what?! What the—
heck? I don’t even know—what just happened?”

As the player activates the 1-button, they set into motion a chain of events:
the gold block that has been preset in the hole disappears, a new gold block
appears, and the entire level is set on fire. The player’s avatar suffers a brief
fiery death, and is resurrected (respawned) further back in the game as
a punishment mechanism. The learning that occurs here is rarely mathema­
tical—rather, it is adjusting and adapting to the initial structures and con­
sistent reactions of the digital context.
Since at this point, players knew very little about the goal of the game—or
even that failure exists in the fiery death form—they often expressed surprise.
For example, Figure 4 illustrates when Emmett’s avatar dies for the first time.
(All player names in this manuscript are pseudonyms.)
This experience aligns with the didactical theory of learning, as Emmett
acted upon the context by activating a button. In turn, the context acted
upon Emmett by providing visual evidence of what their action accom­
plished, and then set the avatar on fire to indicate that they had failed to
accomplish what the context requested of them. Brousseau notes that neither
direction of action need include teachers or other students, and in this case,
as illustrated, the situation of action occurs within and between the player
and the game.
Soon after, players start to avoid actions that lead to failure, a step on the
path to understanding the adidactical context. This discovery of the failure
mechanism, and development of the goal of avoiding failure, supports
players in transitioning to Zone 2.

Zone 2: Developing a preference

During this zone, players experience failure in whatever guise it takes, and
although they do not yet understand that their actions are what caused the
game’s failure state, they begin to seek to avoid failure. This zone, like the
first, is generally quite brief, and is another foundational piece for the
mathematical learning that occurs in the following zones.
 JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES 519

As an example of Zone 2, we will look at an example of two people playing

together. When Martin and Nathan began playing, they immediately start
performing a comedy of errors—every time one of them begins to attend to
the game’s feedback, the other activates the 1-button, resulting in a fiery
death (as shown above in Figure 3). Finally, their sixth time through the first
puzzle, Martin finally decided to “try pulling all of them” in a series, moving
to the button after the 1-button, the 2-button, which was successful (see
Figure 5).
Then they noticed that Rolly is able to roll across the hole and follow
them, and they were able to identify the desired effect: filling the hole
perfectly with the golden blocks. Then they entered the second puzzle
(Figure 6).
Martin and Nathan instantly agreed that the 3-button is the correct
choice. After activating it and experiencing fiery death, they interpreted the
feedback and failure accurately:

Figure 5. The result of a player activating the middle button in Puzzle 1.

Figure 6. Puzzle 2. The white line has been added to show where the preset block ends.
520 WILLIAMS-PIERCE AND THEVENOW-HARRISON

Nathan says, “We gotta get four!”

Martin agrees, saying, “I didn’t know it’d delete it.”

In other words, neither of them realized that the preset one-fourth block
would disappear before three copies were deposited in the hole, and conse­
quently they would be one block short in filling the hole. This moment
supported them in moving to the next zone.
The playfulness of failure often manifested itself in this zone, given that
consistent feedback through the failure from the adidactical situation is how
players transition to Zone 3. For example, one dyad, Christian and Samantha,
had so little gameplay experience that they repeatedly and accidentally acti­
vated the incorrect buttons in Puzzle 1, resulting in their fiery deaths with no
understanding of which actions caused the deaths. However, the didactical
contract supports such playful bemused failure—for example, after one of their
many deaths, Christian said, “This is fun! I’m so confused, though . . . ” In
other words, failure in this context is not synonymous with a sense of frustra­
tion because players know that the context was designed to support their
learning, and that they will move forward once they figure out how to attend to
the feedback and failure pairing. However, despite the often playful valence of
failure, in this zone players develop a preference for moving successfully
through the game and avoiding failure, and hence away to Zone 3.

Zone 3: Developing responsibility and causality

While the first two zones are focused on learning how to play the game and
identifying the game structures relevant to such play, Zone 3 is where the
foundation necessary for mathematical reasoning begins to develop. In this
zone, players understand that their actions—such as activating a button—directly
cause a consistent reaction from the game. This action-reaction pairing supports
players in beginning to reason about why a certain action causes a certain
reaction, such that they begin to explore the underlying mathematical structures.
A player in Zone 3 has determined that cause and effect are linked, and
has begun to develop their understanding of their own agency within the
context. Here, we will follow a single player, Ike, as they progressed sequen­
tially from Zone 3 to Zone 5. Although this example follows Ike as they move
sequentially through the Zones, these Zones are not always linear, and
players often shift back and forth.
Ike had developed a successful but inefficient strategy for solving each
puzzle: activating a button somewhere in the middle of the puzzle, then use
the visual feedback to move up or down the buttons to increase or decrease
the amount deposited in the hole. In their words, they were “mainly going by
trial and error”; hereafter we use the phrase approximation strategy when
referring to Ike using this solution method. In other words, Ike understood
 JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES 521

Figure 7. Puzzle 7 (left); Ike has solved Puzzle 7 (right).

that the action-reaction pairs existed, but did not yet understand why an
action caused a specific reaction. This placed them in the third zone because
Ike understood that their choice determined the game response, and they
used the game response to modify their choice as they repeatedly ran through
the same puzzle. However, Ike had not yet developed a hypothesis of how the
blocks within the hole relate to the buttons, and while they used approxima­
tion strategies to eventually choose the correct button, they had no way of
anticipating the game’s response prior to activation beyond knowing that
a smaller button would result in a smaller amount of blocks.
Ike used his approximation strategy successfully, albeit with frequent
deaths, until doing so in the tenth puzzle resulted in a permadeath (a more
punishing version of failure), which required them to replay part of the game
starting at the Puzzle 7 (see Figure 7, left). These frequent deaths, and the
permadeath, led them to seek a more efficient, reliable, and mathematically
sophisticated strategy for playing the game.
Ike successfully re-completed the seventh puzzle using his approximation
strategy (Figure 7, right), and had a stroke of insight: “Okay, so, I chose 6. And
six things came in.” In other words, they realized that activating the 6-button
when there is one preset block resulted in six blocks of the same size. Ike then
began to develop a hypothesis about the mathematical behavior of the game:
that the button they choose has a discernible relationship with how many
blocks (“things”) result. In this moment, Ike has developed an understanding
of their responsibility for acting within the game, and the knowledge that those
actions will cause consistent reactions from the game—in other words, they
have developed a sense of responsibility and causality. Ike’s actions and
resulting hypothesis supported them in shifting to the next zone, as well as
moving away from the less sophisticated approximation strategy.

Zone 4: Developing anticipation

This zone is where players begin developing, testing, and nuancing math­
ematical hypotheses about their actions, the game’s reactions, and the
522 WILLIAMS-PIERCE AND THEVENOW-HARRISON

underlying mathematical design behind the action-reaction pairing.

Consequently, this is also where players begin engaging in mathematical
play, because while previous zones include play, Zone 4 is when this play
becomes mathematical.
Immediately after Ike realized that their button choice directly influences
how many blocks fall, shifting from Zone 3 to Zone 4, they entered Puzzle 8
(see puzzle in Figure 8 and accompanying transcript).
Ike reflected back to Puzzle 7, where there was a single preset block and
activating the 6-button resulted in six blocks. They called that single preset
block the “scale”—that is, the quantity that the 6-button operation acts upon.
In this puzzle, they began by dismissing the fact that there are two preset
blocks and mentally iterated their “scale” (a single block) to estimate that
they needed to activate a 5-button to get five blocks. When they realized that
a 5-button is not an option, they immediately activated the 2.5-button
instead. When the interviewer asked why, they said that two and a half is
the only amount that has a clear relationship with five (e.g., two doesn’t go
into five cleanly, but two and a half does) and that the two preset blocks
might be important in some way.
This illustrates that Ike has begun to hypothesize about the relationship
between the preset blocks and the hole, and has started to integrate their

Figure 8. Puzzle 8 with white lines added to show partitions, and accompanying
transcript.
 JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES 523

actions with the game’s reactions, based upon that hypothesized relationship.
However, they had not yet reached a point where they were fully anticipating
the results of their actions, although that followed closely behind in the next
puzzle (see Figure 9).
After Ike counted the number of preset blocks (4) and the number of
blocks needed (7), they mentally calculated one-fourth of seven, and subse­
quently activated the 1.75-button. Here, they anticipated seven blocks filling
the hole prior to activating the button because they knew that if one-fourth of
seven is 1.75, then multiplying four fourths by 1.75 will result in a total of
seven blocks.
In these two puzzles, Ike began developing, testing, and nuancing
their mathematical hypotheses about how their actions and the game’s
reactions are mathematically tied together. In particular, Ike is develop­
ing a sense of anticipation: when they activate a button, they are doing
so within the framework of mathematical hypotheses they have formed
about the game’s underlying structure and responses. Consequently, they
are acting alongside an anticipation of how the game will likely respond.
In addition, Ike’s reasoning in Puzzle 9 actually represents their transi­
tioning from Zone 4 to Zone 5: in order to quickly calculate one-fourth

Figure 9. Ike in Puzzle 9. The white lines have been added to show where the preset
blocks are pre-partitioned. The six buttons available progress from a single dot to two-
and-a-quarter dots, in increments of a quarter.
524 WILLIAMS-PIERCE AND THEVENOW-HARRISON

of seven, he thought back to a pretest item in which he equipartitioned

a 7-inch long rectangle into fourths. As this is the only occasion of Ike
quickly and confidently mentally calculating a fairly difficult mathema­
tical computation, we attribute this outlier to Ike recalling completing
a parallel item in the pretest. This thinking back indicated an element of
Zone 5 reasoning, and here foreshadows Ike’s movement into a fully
established Zone 5 state.

Zone 5: Developing the adidactical situation

In Zone 5, players begin using their previous experiences before gameplay (e.
g., formal education or pre-interview) or from their gameplay experience
thus far, to guide in-game choices. This zone emerges when a didactical
contract—the promise that a learner can learn from the knowledge and tools
in front of them—merges with an adidactical situation—a series of problems
designed to evoke the desired knowledge from the learner—in order to
produce “a situation of learning by adaptation” (Brousseau, 1997, p. 58). In
particular, this experience is designed to result in a form of transfer through
reflection generalizations (Ellis, 2007). In other words, Zone 5 is where
mathematical play connects most clearly to mathematical learning. To illus­
trate, we follow Ike into the tenth puzzle (see Figure 2b), which they
encountered for the second time after his approximation strategy attempt
here previously—right before they entered Zone 3—caused a more punish­
ing form of failure that forced them to re-solve puzzles they had already
solved.
Upon seeing the puzzle, Ike immediately referred back to the eighth
puzzle, and said out loud to themself, “Is this related to the one with five?”
Both this puzzle and Puzzle 8 (Figure 8) had two preset blocks, so Ike
explicitly related the “scale” of multiplying as the same for the two puzzles,
and they quickly and successfully activated the 3-button. In other words, they
integrated this problem into the mental model they had developed due to
previous gameplay experiences, and knew that two preset blocks, multiplied
by three, would result in a perfect filling of the hole. This use of previous
learning to guide in-game choices illustrates that Ike is in Zone 5, developing
and experiencing the adidactical situation. In short, they have created a
mental model of the game based on their previous experiences, and are
using that model to guide their gameplay.

Discussion and conclusion

Rolly’s Adventure is rarely overtly mathematical (i.e., the game does not
explicitly indicate that the game is about multiplicative relationships, or
introduce notation until Puzzle 10), and primarily implicitly models
 JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES 525

mathematical relationships between quantities. Nonetheless, every partici­

pant reached Zone 3 of mathematical play, and only one participant did not
progress further into Zones 4 and 5. Participants who fully entered Zone 5,
like Ike, still found RA challenging—the increasing complexity from puzzle
to puzzle left no opportunity for application of rote understanding. One
current limitation of this research is a strong connection to learning during
and after gameplay—that is, how might this game contribute directly to later
mathematical learning and reasoning in life and school? This is especially
crucial given that our participants had already been introduced to fractions
and proportions in formal education contexts. We are currently examining
parts of this very topic in Williams-Pierce et al. (in revision), but it is a rich
and unanswered area of inquiry.
We take this opportunity to describe why the fifth characteristic of provo­
cative objects—the legitimate possibility of alternative conceptual paths for
successful progression—applies to a linear game such as RA. Although moving
from one puzzle to the next requires the activation of a particular button (e.g.,
in Puzzle 1, the 2-button), which seems to contradict this characteristic, the
player’s conceptualization of the puzzles and the mathematical relationships
within their structures is open to their own interpretation. The fact that we
originally designed RA to be about multiplication of fractions, but the players
varied so much in their own interpretation and mathematization of the game
that we had to include other approaches (such as proportional reasoning), is
strong evidence that players can—and do—take alternative conceptual paths
and still progress successfully. Other provocative objects may not be linear,
such that the game adapts in the moment to the players’ interactions; con­
versely, such non-linear games are not necessarily provocative objects. That is,
games may adapt in the moment to the player, but do so with the specific goal
of constraining the players’ conceptual path to the single desired one.
Consequently, this characteristic is about alternate conceptual paths, not
whether alternate paths are programmed into the game
Even if video games are designed with the five characteristics of provoca­
tive objects, such design is not a guarantee of mathematical play—learners in
formal education settings are not voluntarily engaging in the gameplay,
which some game designers consider to automatically preclude calling the
activity a “game” at all (McGonigal, 2011; Schell, 2008). Similarly, Steffe and
Wiegel (1994) note that “fostering mathematical activity with a playful
orientation can be challenging if children . . . regard their school mathema­
tical activity as compulsory” (p. 112). In other words, if RA or other provo­
cative objects are used in a classroom setting, and students must play the
game, whether or not they approach the game with a playful orientation may
be assisted by the design of the game, but cannot be guaranteed—and may be
a fundamentally different type of playful orientation than voluntary players
526 WILLIAMS-PIERCE AND THEVENOW-HARRISON

bring with them. How the context of classroom influences mathematical play
is an as yet untapped—but important—area of research.
Keith Devlin, mathematician and game designer, claims that “using video
games is the way Euclid would have taught basic mathematics had that
technology been around in ancient Greece” (2011, p. 47). While we have
no way to test this claim, Devlin is certainly correct about one thing: Video
games provide a new and rich platform for representing, interacting with,
and learning mathematics. In particular, video games can be structured so
that they provide an adidactical learning experience, adhere to the didactical
contract, and provoke mathematical play.

Acknowledgments
This research partially sponsored by the Patterson-Solie Family & Sector67.
A version of this paper was presented at the 2017 American Educational Research
Association Conference. Many thanks to Dennis Ramirez, Fatih M. Dogan, Amber
Simpson, & Paul N. Reimer for their support and thoughtful review of previous
versions of this article, as well as to the JLS editors and anonymous reviewers, who
encouraged as they critiqued.

ORCID
Caro Williams-Pierce http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0730-6179
Jordan T. Thevenow-Harrison http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4793-9213

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