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VedicViz: Towards Visualizing Vedic Principles in Mental Arithmetic

Augmenting teaching with visualization can help students understand concepts better. Researchers have leveraged visualization to teach conventional mathematics some examples being spatial and origami visualizations. Apart from conventional mathematics, systems such as mental arithmetic involve techniques for rapid calculation without the use of any computing tools and hence have been used in developing computational competence among students. Vedic Mathematics is one such set of techniques for mental computation. However, there is a lack of technical tools which tackle mental arithmetic concepts and provide aid in the teaching of these topics to school students. Therefore, we propose VedicViz, a web portal that provides dynamic visualization of mathematical operations such as addition, multiplication and square root calculation, based on techniques in Vedic Mathematics. The web portal also provides visualization that enables learners to compare and contrast the mental mathematics based approach with the traditional methods for various inputs and operations. We evaluated VedicViz with 20 volunteers, who were in their high school education level. They found our web portal to be useful in practicing and learning to use the methods to perform various mathematical operations.