5. The Student Experience of Model Development Activties: Going Beyond Correctness to Meet a Client’s Needs

For today’s students to be successful tomorrow in the world beyond school, their mathematics education must go beyond assembling a fixed toolkit of skills and procedures. They will need to be able to adapt and apply the material they learn in school in subtle ways, in order to produce tactful and appropriate solutions to problems under constraints and uncertainty. In this chapter, we describe a genre of activities that provide this kind of experience to learners in classrooms settings. We consider the student experience of these activities, and we show how uncertainty about how to apply the knowledge they have learned opens up space for students to use mathematical ways of thinking to interpret the world. We then show how the presence of a concrete Client provides a means for students to continually test whether their emerging solutions are responsive to the human needs and perspectives of this Client, as well as sensitive to other people in the problem who are affected by their solution.