Abstract
Digital reality technologies have the potential to transform the fields of education, remote work, marketing and economy, and the entertainment sector and begin to create an information communication paradigm. We can say that the new paradigm has begun to take shape around the Metaverse concept. This study was a literature review that investigated using the Metaverse in the field of mathematics education. The scope of this review was the studies, including the “Metaverse” keyword and “mathematics,” “mathematics education,” “teaching mathematics,” or “mathematics learning” keywords, which include the studies listed in Web of Science, Scopus, Academia, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar. The authors examined the purpose of the studies, the scope of the studies, using technology in the studies, the research method of the studies, and the findings of the studies on teaching mathematics in the Metaverse environment. They presented a discussion of the possible advantages and disadvantages that mathematics education could offer.
TopBackground
American mathematician Vernor Vinge first introduced the Metaverse idea in 1981 in his novel called True Names (Sun et al., 2022). The author described a virtual world that provided access to sensory experience through the brain-computer interface in the novel (Erkli, 2022). American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson described an Internet world parallel to the real world where digital avatars were used for perception and interaction in 1992. He used the term “metaverse” for the first time in his novel called Snow Crash (Sun et al., 2022). A metaverse called OASIS appeared in the novel called Ready Player One and the movie of the same name in 2018 (Kim, 2021). The first attempt to create a realistic metaverse, but still far from the perception of reality, was the game platform called Second Life, which was launched in 2003 and reached approximately one million regular users at its peak (Lamb, 2022). The Second Life platform had its currency, and users could build properties, organize events, and design their avatars, but there was nothing specific users could achieve in real life (Sparkes, 2021). Today, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and technologies such as Blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFT) have been developed. In the coming years, Metaverses using VR or AR on affordable devices may become much more popular and start to offer practical, useful, and entertaining characteristics.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Blockchain: It is a digital ledger that is shared and independently verified by each participant that records transactions using encryption in blocks.
Mathematics Learning: It is every process used to make learning mathematics a reality and to help students develop the behaviors they want.
Teaching Mathematics: It is all the activities of teaching mathematics in schools.
Mathematics: It is a science that examines the structures, properties and relations between forms, numbers, and quantities through deductive reasoning and is divided into branches such as arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.
Mathematics Education: It is the process of transferring knowledge, skills, and values related to mathematics to the next generation in a planned way and changing human behaviors through experiences.
Databases: It is the storage of interrelated data in a way that allows multi-purpose use without repetition.
Augmented Reality: It is a technology where the physical world and virtual objects integrate in real-time and meet the user in the same sensory environment.
Metaverse: It is a massively scaled and interoperable version of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be simultaneously and permanently experienced by an unlimited number of users.
Virtual Reality: It is the use of computer modeling and simulation that allows a person to interact with an artificial 3D visual or another sensory environment.