The name ‘refugee camp curriculum’ is a metaphor for a situation where mathematics is taught from the beginning and with simple manipulatives. Thus, it is also a proposal for a curriculum for early childhood education, for adult education, for educating immigrants, and for learning mathematics outside institutionalized education.
It considers mathematics a number-language parallel to our word-language, both describing the outside world in full sentences, typically containing a subject and a verb and a predicate.
The task of the number-language is to describe the natural fact Many in space and time, first by counting and recounting and double-counting to transform outside examples of Many to inside sentences about the total; then by adding to unite (or split) inside totals in different ways depending on their units and on them being constant or changing.
This allows designing a curriculum for all students inspired by Tarp (2018) that focuses on proportionality, solving equations and calculus from the beginning, since proportionality occurs when recounting in a different unit, equations occur when recounting from tens to icons, and calculus occurs when adding block-numbers next-to and when adding per-numbers coming from double-counting in two units.
Talking about ‘refugee camp mathematics’ thus allows locating a setting where children do not have access to normal education, thus raising the question ‘What kind and how much mathematics can children learn outside normal education especially when residing outside normal housing conditions and without access to traditional learning materials?’.
This motivates another question ‘How much mathematics can be learned as ‘finger-math’ using the examples of Many coming from the body like fingers, arms, toes and legs?’
So, the goal of ‘refugee camp mathematics’ is to learn core mathematics through ‘Finger-math’ disclosing how much math comes from counting the fingers.