Treffer: Enriching Students' Combinatorial Reasoning through the Use of Loops and Conditional Statements in Python

When solving counting problems, students often struggle with determining what they are trying to count (and thus what problem type they are trying to solve and, ultimately, what formula appropriately applies). There is a need to explore potential interventions to deepen students' understanding of key distinctions between problem types and to differentiate meaningfully between such problems. In this paper, we investigate undergraduate students' understanding of sets of outcomes in the context of elementary Python computer programming. We show that four straightforward program conditional statements seemed to reinforce important conceptual understandings of four canonical combinatorial problem types. We also suggest that the findings in this paper represent one example of a way in which a computational setting may facilitate mathematical learning.

As Provided