Multisensory Activity: Taste the Ratio (Skittles)

While working with a handful of Skittles, I began thinking about how this task could be redesigned through the lens of tactile and sensory access, as discussed in Stylianidou and Nardi (2019). Inspired by their work with blind and sighted pupils, I imagined an activity where students would temporarily blindfold themselves and engage with the mathematics through taste rather than colour.

In this version of the task, students would taste the Skittles and describe them by flavour rather than colour. For example, brown could be described as berry punch, blue as raspberry, green as melon berry, red as wild cherry, and orange as strawberry. The focus shifts from visual identification to sensory discrimination and language.

Students would then engage in a “Taste the Ratio” activity. They would identify ratios (for example, berry punch to raspberry), predict how different ratios might affect the overall taste, and combine Skittles to create ratios such as 2:3 or 1:4. Students could explore equivalent ratios by scaling their mixtures and compare how the taste changes as proportions change.

Mathematically, this task supports reasoning about ratios, equivalence, and scaling. Conceptually, it reframes ratio as something that can be experienced, not just calculated. The sweetness of the task is intentional—engagement, pleasure, and curiosity become part of the mathematical experience rather than distractions from it.

This activity directly reflects the argument made by Stylianidou and Nardi (2019): when learning experiences are designed to work without relying on a single sense, they benefit all learners. Blindfolding the class removes vision as the dominant sense, allowing all students to participate in the same way. Rather than creating a special accommodation for students with visual impairments, the task becomes universally designed, supporting inclusion while also expanding how sighted students understand mathematical relationships.

In this way, the task challenges ableist assumptions about how mathematics must be accessed and demonstrates how multisensory experiences can lead to deeper, more meaningful, and more lasting mathematical understanding.