The Sliammon
version of the second Small Number story has been included in the
Sliammon language segment of the First Voices website: http://www.firstvoices.com/en/Sliammon/story
Oshele from the Sliammon
Nation, describes the project in the following way, "This is not a traditional Sliammon story but one
that could be told in any First Nations communty. The story appealed to
us because of it descriptive language and presented a challenge to
translate. The story also has a math focus and we hope to encourage
teachers to use it."
Small Number
The main character in our animations thus far is a boy called Small Number. He is a bright, playful kid, with the ability to recognize patterns and calculate quickly.
Other characters introduced so far are Big Circle, Small Number’s best friend, Perfect Number, Small Number’s sister, and Small Number’s mother and grandparents. An important part of our stories is love. His grandparents, his mother, his sister, and his friend all love Small Number, and he loves them back.
To underline the universality of mathematics, Small Number and the plots of our stories are not attached to a particular time and space. In the first story Small Number lives in a tipi settlement somewhere in the plains. In the second story he lives by a body of water, a river or a sea, and the third story is set in an urban environment.
Our intention is to create stories in such a way that they allow for interpretations at multiple levels of mathematical knowledge. For example, our first story, Small Number Counts to 100, can be shown to elementary school students as a counting practice/puzzle or as a pattern recognition problem. For high school students it could be a way to introduce arithmetic progressions, modular addition, or an idea of number systems with a base different than 10.
In Small Number and the Old Canoe mathematics is present throughout the story with the hope that this experience will make at least some members of our young audience, with the moderator’s help, recognize more mathematics around them in their everyday lives. We use terms like smooth, shape, oval, and surface, the mathematical phraseology like, It must be at least a hundred years old, our artist Mr. Simon Roy from Victoria, British Columbia, skillfully presents reflection (symmetry) of trees in water, and so on.
The idea behind this approach is to give the moderator a few openings to introduce or emphasize various mathematical objects, concepts, and terminology. The short film is a little math suspense story and our question is related only to the last part of it. The aim of the question is to lead to an introduction at an intuitive level of the concept of a function and the essence of the principle of inclusion-exclusion as a counting technique. We would also like to give our audience an opportunity to appreciate that in order to understand a math question, one often needs to read (or in this case, watch) a problem more than once.
The mathematical context of the third story, Small Number and the Basketball Tournament, contains some basic principles of combinatorics. The plot of the story and the closing question are structured in a manner that allows the moderator to introduce the notion of permutations and combinations. Since the numbers used in the story are relatively small, this can be used to encourage the young audience to explore on their own. Mathematics is also present in the background. Small Number and his friends do mathematics after school in the Aboriginal Friendship Centre. He loves playing the game of Set and when he comes home his sister is just finishing her math homework. Small Number and his friend would like to participate in a big half-court tournament, and so on.
