Semiotic Alternations with the Yupana Inca Tawa Pukllay in the Gamified Learning of Numbers at a Rural Peruvian School

Abstract

Yupana Inca Tawa Pukllay (YITP) is a ludic didactic resource based on semiotic alternation that, using the reading of numbers in the Inca numeral system, improves its equivalent Indo-Arabic reading. Twelve children from first to fourth grade of a bilingual (Spanish-Quechua), multi-grade elementary school in a small rural Peruvian community were assigned an electronic tablet with YITP and learned autonomously, without teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results obtained show that: (a) they learned in a very short period of time (14 min - 05h 41 min) (b) they improved digit reading accuracy on the first attempt (c) they improved digit reading speed d) they achieved a high percentage of correct reading of numbers containing at least one zero digit. The results suggest the potential of YITP as an educational tool in the teaching-learning process of arithmetic.

Keywords

• semiotic alternations
• yupana inca tawa pukllay
• ethnomathematics gamification
• numeral system
• zero